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California Progressives Want 'Big Oil' To Fix an Insurance Crisis Created by the State's Price Controls

2026-04-17T14:33:56Z

The Orange County Register Editorial Board once interviewed state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) about his bill to decriminalize the use of some psychedelics. We questioned the obvious inconsistency between his anti-prohibition stance on mushrooms and his prohibitionist stance on vaping and flavored-tobacco products. He reminded us that he's a San Francisco progressive and not a libertarian. Fair point.

I recall that encounter as I mulled Wiener's Senate Bill 982, which mainly encourages the state attorney general to sue oil companies "for climate-attributable damage to recover costs and losses suffered by the California FAIR Plan." The Fair Access to Insurance Requirement Plan is the state-created, insurance-industry-funded, barebones insurer of last resort. It has been teetering on the fiscal brink since property insurers began exiting the state or reducing their underwriting, thus overloading the plan with customers.

This legislation wants Big Oil to pay for an insurance crisis caused by the state's price controls. This is non-serious lawmaking—a transparent virtue-signal rather than an effort at problem-solving. Wiener is a thoughtful lawmaker who championed groundbreaking housing-deregulation laws, but in this case the San Francisco progressive won out.

What's wrong with drilling oil companies? For starters, it's wrong to pin the state's wildfire-related troubles on companies that sell a legal, highly taxed and regulated product to consumers. Climate change likely has contributed to severe wildfire seasons, but that's a multifaceted public-policy failure. Senate Bill 982 is just a blame game and an effort to get "free" money from a deep-pocketed third party. It's a fancy way to engage in a financial taking.

The bill's supporters rely on conspiratorial hyperbole that would make a MAGA podcaster proud. This is from an op-ed from Wiener and the bill's co-author Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D–San Diego): "Large multinational oil and gas corporations spent decades lying to the public about their products' contribution to climate change and working to undermine the transition to cleaner energy sources. They're uniquely responsible for the mess we're in; it's only fair they share the financial consequences."

Oil companies, and opponents of a government-forced transition to windmills and solar panels, have every right to express views that are contrary to the green-energy mantra. There's substantial academic disagreement and new thinking on many aspects of climate change—and numerous places to assess blame for what's ultimately a global challenge.

For instance, California's government has only conducted a tiny portion of the land-clearance work its own CalFIRE says is necessary to reduce wildfire risk. A University of Chicago report found that a single year of California's "wildfire emissions is close to double emissions reductions achieved over 16 years." In other words, the state's own wildfire failures are obliterating its climate goals. Maybe the AG should start by suing the state government.

State officials are now concerned about the exodus of refiners, which is driving up gas prices. If you don't like the oil industry, fine—but good luck powering the world's fourth-largest economy without it. We already have the nation's steepest prices because of our highest-in-the-nation gas taxes, stringent environmental regulations, and special-fuels mandate that limits our ability to buy gasoline from other states. This could be the last straw for refiners foolish enough to remain here.

Fundamentally, this legislation gives short shrift to the real cause of California's insurance crisis: voters and regulators. Californians in 1988 approved Proposition 103, which created a system of price controls. The insurance commissioner gained the power to approve and roll back rates. And the state has failed to implement those regulations in a way that allows insurers to deftly adjust their underwriting and pricing to reflect risk from a changing climate.

After some ferocious wildfire years, insurers faced massive losses. Their risk soared, but the Department of Insurance capped their rates. Inflation also played a role, as it became more costly to rebuild damaged properties. So insurers started exiting the market or stopped writing new policies, thus reducing competition. This is how price controls always backfire. Meanwhile, the best way to keep rates low is to have a vibrant market filled with competitors.

Until recently, California wouldn't even let insurers use catastrophe models to help determine rates. If the climate is warming, then why would insurers have to base rates on past losses rather than forward-looking models?

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara created the Sustainable Insurance Strategy, which addressed some of the major issues. It sped up the rate-review process, allowed insurers to factor the rising cost of reinsurance policies in their rates, and bolstered the FAIR Plan. Lara also granted painful but necessary rate hikes. There's much more to be done, but several companies have announced their plans to jumpstart California underwriting.

"No one should be priced out of their homes because they can't afford insurance," the senators wrote. Agreed, but this bill substitutes the long, painstaking, and complex work of fixing California's troubled insurance market with finger-pointing and posturing. One needn't be a libertarian to recognize that reality.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Will the Eleventh Circuit Allow the Endangered Species Act to Commandeer the Florida Department of Environmental Protection?

2026-04-17T14:06:58Z

New Hampshire is not the only state subject to court-ordered commandeering. Next week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit will hear oral argument in Bear Warriors United v. Lambert, in which Florida is appealing a district court order effectively commandeering the state under the Endangered Species Act.

Bear Warriors United (BWU) is an environmental organization "dedicated to defending Florida's wildlife and serving as a powerful voice for nature." Among the species BWU seeks to protect is the manatee, which is currently listed as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

In 2022, BWU filed suit against the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) alleging that it was violating the ESA by failing to adopt and enforce sufficiently stringent regulations governing nitrogen discharges from septic tanks and wastewater treatment plants into the Indian River Lagoon, which is frequented by manatees. This failure, BWU alleges, contributes to eutrophication and the loss of seagrasses upon which the manatees rely and is thus a "take" under Section 9 of the ESA, which prohibits actions that "harm" listed species.

At heart, BWU's claim is that the FDEP is "taking" manatees because it is failing to control the private and other activities that threaten manatee populations. As the district court noted, it is "FDEP's ongoing failure to use its authority to regulate" more stringently that is at issue. Therein lies the problem.

There is reasonable debate about the extent to which the ESA's definition of harm encompasses conduct that affects species indirectly. The Supreme Court embraced a relatively broad definition of "harm" in the Sweet Home decision that encompasses habitat modification that, in turn, impairs the feeding, breeding or nesting activity of listed species. Relying upon this definition, some courts have concluded that omissions--in this case, failure to prevent activities that could adversely affect species--qualify as "harm." This is a controversial conclusion, however, and the Trump Administration has proposed narrowing that definition.

Whatever the proper definition of "harm" is under the ESA, BWU's claim has a larger problem: Under its theory, state governments are obligated to use their regulatory authority to enforce a federal regulatory scheme. This is not a case in which effluent from a state-run sewage treatment plant or other state activities are allegedly harming a listed species. It instead involves a state failing to use its sovereign regulatory authority in a manner that serves the federal government's goals. This is textbook commandeering. Thus even if one is inclined to accept the broad definition of "harm" that some courts have accepted, it cannot be enforced against state governments in this fashion.

The district court dismissed Florida's commandeering concerns in a cavalier (and somewhat incoherent) fashion. After noting in one order that "the anticommandeering doctrine does not bar federal laws that 'regulate state activities, rather than seeking to control or influence the manner in which States regulate private parties'" (quoting Reno v. Condon), the court proceeded to accept BWU's argument that the ESA's take prohibition could be used to control how FDEP regulates private parties. In another order the court correctly noted that "the anticommandeering doctrine does not apply when Congress evenhandedly regulates an activity in which both States and private actors engage" (quoting Murphy v. NCAA), but somehow missed that regulating private septic systems and wastewater treatment plants is not "an activity in which both States and private actors engage." It is, rather, precisely the sort of exercise of sovereign authority that only governments engage in, and is thus precisely what the anticommandeering doctrine protects from federal control.

This is not the first time a lower court has interpreted the ESA in a manner that violates the anticommandeering doctrines. In Strahan v. Coxe (1997), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit concluded Massachusetts could be required to revoke licenses and permits for gillnet and lobster pot fishing under the ESA and Marine Mammal Protection Act without violating the anticommandeering doctrine. In the First Circuit's view, this was just federal supremacy in action, and the state was merely required to comply with federal law. But this misunderstands the dynamic. There is no question a state cannot immunize private action from federal prohibition, but this does not mean a state can be required to regulate or inhibit activity the federal government wishes to control, and this is true even if the state chooses to act within the relevant policy space. This is as true of gillnets and nitrogen discharges as it is of marijuana and gambling.

Although Strahan was wrong (as I discussed here at pp. 428-30), district courts have largely followed the First Circuit's reasoning. This has occurred even though, in 2018, in Murphy v. NCAA, the Supreme Court expressly held that the anticommandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from barring states from permitting a federally targeted activity (in that case, gambling) under state law.

The same principle applies in the environmental context. The federal government is free to regulate nitrogen discharges and other activities that harm listed species, and even to authorize citizen suits to assist in federal law's enforcement. It cannot require states to prohibit such activities, however. And just because a state has chosen to create its own regulatory apparatus, that apparatus cannot be required to apply standards dictated by federal law. Thus however expansively one is inclined to interpret the ESA's take prohibition, it cannot be applied as the district court did here.

I will be curious to hear how the Eleventh Circuit engages with these arguments next week, and whether it recognizes the errors of the First Circuit's analysis. There seems to be lots of confusion about commandeering these days. I also have a draft manuscript ("Conservation Commandeering") which goes into these arguments in greater depth. It will go up on SSRN soon. Until then, stay tuned.

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FISA Reform Blues

2026-04-17T13:34:32Z

Short-term FISA extension. The House voted early Friday to extend the expiring Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for another 10 days, as members debate whether to include privacy protections in a longer-term extension of the law.

The House vote extends FISA, which was set to expire on Monday, through April 30. Some Republican House members have been demanding that Section 702 of the law, which allows the federal government to collect the communications of foreigners as well as Americans they communicate with without a warrant, be amended to include additional privacy protections.

Some lawmakers want to require that the government get a warrant before it searches Americans' data collected under Section 702.

The White House and Congressional Republicans have been demanding a "clean" FISA extension without any additional privacy safeguards.

Wyden to the rescue. In the upper chamber, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), a longtime FISA reform advocate, is urging his fellow Democrats to oppose a clean reauthorization bill.

"With recent developments in AI supercharging how the government can surveil Americans, Congress must use this upcoming debate to make necessary reforms to all our surveillance laws," wrote Wyden in a letter to his Senate colleagues obtained exclusively by Politico.

See this interview Wyden gave Reason about FISA and internet privacy.

Scenes from D.C.: Riders on the D.C.-area Metro's Red Line can enjoy a quintessential D.C. experience this summer: not riding the Red Line. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the regional agency that operates the Metro, announced that several stops on the line will be closed from June to September while repairs are performed.

Read my 2023 magazine feature on the D.C. Metro's persistent problems.

QUICK HITS

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives a refreshingly libertarian answer on raw milk.

Rosa DeLauro: "You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services! Is there not some moral responsibility to say don't drink raw milk!"

RFK Jr.: "Every product can contain contaminants. We inform the public and we let people make a choice." pic.twitter.com/MVeOL6vdw5

— Reem Ibrahim (@ReemAmirIbrahim) April 16, 2026

The most cursed headline imaginable. Click if you dare.
President Donald Trump calls the stunt in which he ordered DoorDash to the White House, done to promote his "no tax on tips policy," "a little tacky."

Trump on DoorDash grandma Sharon Simmons's delivery to the White House: "To be honest, it was a little tacky" pic.twitter.com/ID8skObWip

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 17, 2026

Norway gets robotic buses.

For the first time in Norwegian history, a bus will carry passengers in regular traffic without any human behind the wheel. The first pilot without a safety driver was tested Friday, and if all goes as planned, anyone can ride driverless buses starting in May. pic.twitter.com/rlcI9cPfq4

— Joakim (@joakial_) April 16, 2026

Hezbollah appears to be holding to a truce with Israel.

The post FISA Reform Blues appeared first on Reason.com.

Not Judge Judy, Juror Judi—But "Stupid Mistake" Isn't "Actual Malice" for Libel Purposes

2026-04-16T20:25:50Z

From Scheindlin v. Accelerate 360, LLC, decided today by Judge Kyle Dudek (M.D. Fla.):

For many decades, Plaintiff Judy Sheindlin—known to millions of daytime television viewers simply as Judge Judy—has cultivated a public reputation as a tough-on-crime, no-nonsense arbitrator. The defendants in this case, A360 Media, LLC and Accelerate360, LLC (collectively "A360"), operate in a very different sphere: they publish and distribute celebrity news and tabloids, including the National Enquirer and In Touch Weekly.

In April 2024, their worlds collided. A360 published articles claiming that Sheindlin had appeared in a true-crime docuseries to advocate for the resentencing of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the notorious brothers convicted of murdering their parents. The articles reported that Scheindlin felt the brothers had been railroaded. And they quoted her as claiming the trial was "rigged."

It turns out none of this was true. An A360 reporter had watched a clip from the docuseries and mistakenly identified a different older woman—an alternate juror named Judi Zamos—for the famous television judge. Predictably, Sheindlin was not pleased. She filed this defamation lawsuit, alleging that the false reports subjected her to public ridicule and tarnished her carefully curated brand.

A360 now seeks summary judgment. It readily admits the stories were wrong, but argues that the misidentification was an honest, if unfortunate, mistake. Because of this, A360 contends that Sheindlin cannot clear the high constitutional hurdle of proving actual malice—a strict requirement for public figures suing for defamation. Furthermore, A360 argues that Sheindlin cannot prove she suffered any actual, compensable damages under Florida law.

Because the First Amendment requires a showing of actual malice rather than mere negligence, and because Sheindlin has failed to produce evidence meeting that heavy burden, her defamation claim must fail. A360's motion for summary judgment is thus GRANTED….

Here's the court "side-by-side comparison of the two" women's images:

And a bit more:

How did a reporter make such a colossal mix-up? The misidentification traces back to a promotional pitch. In March 2024, Fox News contacted A360 about an upcoming docuseries on the Menendez brothers. The pitch included a link to the show's trailer. That trailer featured a brief clip of an older woman with short hair, wearing a black top with a decorative white collar, who opined that the brothers' trial was rigged. The woman was not identified by name in the video.

Upon watching the trailer, A360 reporter Michael Jaccarino jumped to a conclusion: the woman was Judge Judy. He based this on her clothing—which he thought resembled Sheindlin's signature judicial robe and lace collar—and the fact that she was commenting on a high-profile legal matter. Jaccarino admitted he had not seen a photograph of Sheindlin in years and simply assumed she had aged into the woman on his screen.

Seeking to flesh out his story, Jaccarino emailed Fox asking for more footage of the "Judge Judy interview." A Fox public relations representative replied with a link to a longer, 40-second clip, telling Jaccarino to "please see below for a link to the Judge Judy clip."

This is where the investigation fatally stalled. In this second clip, an on-screen caption appears for roughly three seconds, explicitly identifying the interviewee as "Judi Zamos," an alternate juror from the first Menendez trial. Jaccarino testified that he completely missed this flashing red warning sign. His explanation was simple: he was looking down at his keyboard, laser-focused on transcribing the audio rather than watching the screen.

Operating under the unshaken assumption that he had his star subject, Jaccarino pressed forward with the article. He researched the gruesome details of the murders and called a defense attorney for a quote on the current legal proceedings. What he did not do, however, was conduct a basic internet search coupling Sheindlin's name with the Menendez brothers to verify the connection. Nor did he follow standard journalistic practice by reaching out to Sheindlin or her representatives for comment prior to publication.

The editorial review process provided no safety net. Jaccarino sent his draft to his editor, Michael Hammer, and included the link to the video clip—the very clip that identified the speaker as Judi Zamos. Hammer never clicked the link or watched the video. He testified that he simply took his reporter at his word. From there, the story was cleared for the National Enquirer and In Touch Weekly….

Despite this, the court concluded (legally correctly, I think) that there wasn't enough evidence "proof that a defamatory statement was published with either 'actual knowledge of its falsity or with a high degree of awareness of its probable falsity'" (so-called "actual malice") for the case to go forward: "A publisher's failure to investigate a statement's accuracy alone won't cut it. Nor will 'even an extreme departure' from reasonable journalistic standards."

Against this backdrop, it is apparent that A360 merely made a genuine (though stupid) mistake.

Charles D. Tobin, Jacquelyn N. Schell, Bradley Gershel, and Saumya Vaishampayan (Ballard Spahr LLP) represent defendants.

The post Not Judge Judy, Juror Judi—But "Stupid Mistake" Isn't "Actual Malice" for Libel Purposes appeared first on Reason.com.

Despite Trump's Promises and Rodríguez's Amnesty Law, Hundreds of Venezuelan Dissidents Are Still Behind Bars

2026-04-16T21:59:35Z

Hours after American forces seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face narco-terrorism charges, President Donald Trump stepped before the cameras with a message for the Venezuelan people: "You're gonna have peace, and you're gonna have safety. You're gonna have justice."

The mechanism for delivering that justice arrived in February, when Maduro's successor, Delcy Rodríguez, signed an amnesty law designed to free almost 1,000 political prisoners who were incarcerated at the time. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the passing of this law was "very positive," but warned it was not enough. A few months later, nothing has really changed for Venezuelans.

The same judicial apparatus that imprisoned more than 2,000 people for protesting Maduro's fraudulent 2024 reelection is now deciding who gets to be freed. To obtain amnesty, detainees must petition the same courts that prosecuted them and hope to get a response within 15 days. The regime says more than 4,000 amnesty applications have been filed since February, and hundreds of prisoners have walked free.

At least 485 people remain in political detention as of early April, some of whom aren't Venezuelan citizens, according to Foro Penal, a human rights watchdog. In recent weeks, authorities have denied 111 amnesties, Martha Tineo, director of the Venezuela-based human rights organization Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón, tells Reason. The real number is likely higher, she says, because accurately tracking denials is "practically impossible," as many affected individuals choose not to make the information public for fear of retaliation.

Many dissidents affected by the arbitrary application of the amnesty law have found themselves excluded from its protections. The text bars actions linked to "terrorism," a vague term that has been used with significant discretion by prosecutors to criminalize political opposition.

This has been the case with Daniel Echenagucia, a 48-year-old cattle industry administrator, who was arrested in 2024 while traveling in the country with his wife, Marian Padilla, and their two teenage children. Padilla says officers never showed the family the arrest warrant they claimed to have. She and the children were also detained, their phones confiscated, and later taken back to the family home, where officials searched the house and seized passports, phones, and electronics. Padilla and the children have not seen Echenagucia since.

Daniel Echenagucia with his wife, Marian Padilla, and their two children. (Marien Padilla)

Echenagucia, an Italian-Venezuelan dual national, has been charged with terrorism, conspiracy, financing of terrorism, and criminal association. Padilla says her husband has lost roughly 60 pounds in prison, and though a release order was issued in January, he remains behind bars. Authorities recently denied his amnesty request, arguing that he was implicated in events from 2019. Padilla disputes that, claiming the family lived in the United States from 2018 to 2022 and was not in Venezuela at the time. Both of Echenagucia's parents are U.S. citizens and have appealed directly to Trump and Rubio to secure his release.

Court order in which a Terrorism Court tells Marian Padilla that her husband will not be a beneficiary of amnesty. (Marien Padilla)

The Rodríguez regime argues the exclusions are legitimate. However, the pattern of denials evidences arbitrary application. Nakary Mena Ramos, a journalist detained over her reporting on rising criminality, was denied amnesty on March 13, only for the charges to be dismissed and her freedom granted days later.

In March, a court told Gabriel González, a journalist working on María Corina Machado's presidential campaign, that he was granted amnesty, barring him from appointing a private attorney or accessing his case file. Weeks later, the same court formally denied his amnesty request.

Hoy 13 de abril me fue notificada la negativa da la solicitud de Amnistía.

A inicios de marzo en el Tribunal 3ro de Juicio de Terrorismo se me informó, luego de que revisaran en una computadora, que aparecía que había sido "beneficiado" por la Amnistía, por lo que no me… pic.twitter.com/O81dcFDJYP

— Gabriel González (@IsmaelGabriel22) April 14, 2026

Javier Tarazona, a university professor, spent more than four years imprisoned, tied to his reporting on violence along the Venezuelan border. Although he was released in February, he was denied amnesty, and the case against him remains active.

Trump has repeatedly invoked Venezuela as proof that his interventionist model works, drawing a direct link to his ongoing military campaign against Iran. But for the Venezuelans whose amnesty requests sit unanswered in courts that answer to the same regime that jailed them, the transformation Trump promised hasn't materialized. The dictator's name has changed, but the oppressive apparatus has not.

The post Despite Trump's Promises and Rodríguez's Amnesty Law, Hundreds of Venezuelan Dissidents Are Still Behind Bars appeared first on Reason.com.

Most Young Australians Successfully Evade the Country's Social Media Ban

2026-04-16T18:46:00Z

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges—and they're debatable—politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids' online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.

Would-Be Internet Regulators Target Troubled Youths

Generation Z is famously more anxious than older generations and subject to increased mental health issues. And never mind that young people have been raised in a chaotic world and were isolated from normal social interactions by public health officials for part of their childhood—the problem must be the online world which they're immersed in.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt gets much of the credit (or blame) for laying the fault at the door of the internet. The author of the 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation, Haidt believes digitally focused lives have done harm to young people and calls for restrictions (imposed by parents or government) on minors' use of smartphones and social media.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic embrace of that message is in Australia, where "as of 10 December 2025, age-restricted social media platforms need to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account," notes the country's eSafety Commissioner. Platforms must implement age verification or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($35.4 million).

But when has a ban or restriction ever gone without significant resistance? Imposing internet-use restrictions on technologically savvy young people was always going to be an uphill battle. The evidence so far suggests that Australia's law has been met with more defiance than compliance.

Young People Are More Tech-Savvy Than Regulators

"There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia's social media ban," reports the U.K.'s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. "Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts."

The group adds that "70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was 'easy' to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts."

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that "a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms' age assurance systems."

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, "around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account." Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.

Interestingly, only about one in 20 young Australians report using the easiest workaround: virtual private network (VPN) software that makes them appear to use the internet from outside Australia. That suggests enforcement of the social media ban has been remarkably ineffective.

"This data suggests that, at least in the medium term, an Australia-style ban is unlikely to deliver the improvements in safety that parents and children deserve and demand," concludes the Molly Rose Foundation. "At worst, the Australian ban risks giving parents a false sense of safety."

With Troubled Youngsters, Politicians May Have Reversed Cause and Effect

Of equal concern, it should be noted, is a false sense of fault for the mental health issues suffered by young people. Part of the problem is that researchers worried about social media appear to have decided on a conclusion and then gone looking for supporting evidence.

"Social media has become conceptualized as something almost like a toxin—in that the more of it that teens consume, the more harmful it is to them," Rebecca Etkin of the Yale Child Study Center commented last month. "Most research in the past decade has focused on trying to show this very relationship between more social media use and worse mental health outcomes in teens. But interestingly, studies have generally failed to find support for this relationship."

Etkin doesn't claim that extensive online activity is harmless. She says we don't yet know and that the blame placed on the digital world is not supported by current science.

The authors of a paper published two years ago in the Journal of Pediatrics suggested that excessive social media use might be a symptom rather than a cause. They noted evidence of "declining mental health leading to more social media use rather than the reverse." Their belief was that "a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."

To put it bluntly, overprotective adults may have driven kids nuts and caused them to take refuge online.

Covid-era lockdowns contributed to depriving children of the opportunity to independently interact with their peers. In 2022, Pew Research reported concerns among childhood experts that "these disruptions could have lingering effects on young people's mental and emotional well-being." Unable to mingle with friends in person, many unhappy kids were forced into online interaction.

Politicians in Australia and elsewhere claiming to be concerned about young people's mental health would do well to remember that meddling policies and hovering parenting styles probably caused the current crisis. Governments should leave the kids alone. And worried parents could do worse than to occasionally take away phones and send children outside to play, unsupervised.

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Today in Supreme Court History: April 17, 1978

2025-07-10T18:35:54Z

4/17/1978: Penn Central Transportation Corporation v. New York argued.

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Review: This Cirque du Soleil Show Reminds Us Nature Knows No Borders

2026-03-25T14:08:10Z

Cirque du Soleil's stunning stage show Luzia, touring five North American cities in 2026, follows a parachutist as he experiences Mexico. In the process, it reveals striking resemblances between Mexican and U.S. culture.

The show's production value and feats of human strength uphold the Cirque du Soleil reputation for high-quality physicality and staging. Pushing the limits of what's possible under the big tent, Luzia brings the outdoors in, using impressive engineering to highlight water's beauty. Its characters—birds, reptiles, mountain lions, monarch butterflies—reflect a diversity that is at once familiar and mysterious to many Americans.

Each year, those monarch butterflies migrate from southern Canada across the U.S. down to the heart of Mexico and back. Throughout the show, those butterflies serve as a graceful reminder that nature knows no borders—and suggest that human beings, across any border, don't have differences worth fearing.

The post Review: This Cirque du Soleil Show Reminds Us Nature Knows No Borders appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Coming Back Clean

2026-04-15T18:02:12Z

A local TV news investigation found that hundreds of people in Georgia who were arrested for DUI in 2025 were later shown to be sober, based on blood tests from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The records show that 701 of the 6,875 blood samples tested had no illegal or prescription drugs in them, even though those people had been charged with driving under the influence. Police only test for drugs in these cases if a driver's blood alcohol level is below the legal limit. As a result, many arrests depended solely on field sobriety tests that were designed to catch drunk drivers, not drug-impaired drivers. Critics say these tests are not reliable for detecting drug use and can lead to false positives, with studies showing a high error rate. As a result, some people spent time in jail and faced charges before later being cleared.

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Open Thread

2026-04-17T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Tweets About Standing!

2026-04-17T04:38:17Z

A few days ago, the D.C. Circuit sent the East Wing case back down to Judge Leon. In my view, the plaintiffs clearly have no standing. Judge Rao's separate opinion cogently explains why.

Judge Leon, undeterred, ruled against Trump again! The White House can continue with "underground" construction but not "aboveground" construction! I suppose Judge Leon is an expert in construction, as he seems to think these two levels can be separated! His new order had fewer exclamation points, but he still declined to address standing. Should this case get to SCOTUS, it will be very easy for the proceduralists to smack down this ruling on standing grounds.

Indeed, even President Trump gets the standing analysis. In a series of social media posts, Trump explains why the plaintiffs in this case lacks standing. I never know how much of Trump's tweets are his and how much come from his lawyers. But at a minimum, these postings (which seem to have been made aboard Air Force One) suggest Trump understands the jurisdictional issues.

Here, Trump points out (correctly) that the only possible plaintiff with an injury is a woman who walks her dog near the White House:

The person who filed the meritless and lawless suit on the desperately needed White House Ballroom, being built as a GIFT to America (without Tax Dollars!), a woman walking her dog, has absolutely NO STANDING to bring such a monumentally important case against our Country. The Trump Hating Judge's opinion is radically different from his first opinion, that was issued weeks ago, while still being unlawful and ambiguous, which never even addressed her COMPLETE lack of Standing. Every Political "Pundit" has said this case is meritless, even a JOKE, but it's not a joke to me, or the people of America. Too much hard work, time, and money spent in order that a Judge can claim that he ruled against "DONALD TRUMP," something which I have gotten very used to, BUT WILL NOT ACCEPT! President DJT

Here Trump points out (correctly) that Judge Leon once again does not even mention standing:

The out of control Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, who doesn't want to accept a $400 Million Dollar GIFT of one of the most beautiful Ballrooms anywhere in the World, desperately needed by the White House and its future Presidents (Due to time constraints, I will barely get to use it!), wants me to build the "underground" portion of the Ballroom, without the "above ground" portion, but the underground doesn't work, isn't necessary, and would indeed be useless, without the above ground sections. The underground portion is wedded to, and serves, the upper portion, including the Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass. It's all tied together as one big, expensive, and very complex unit, which is vital for National Security and Military Operations of the United States of America! The Judge's decision, which doesn't even discuss the vital subject of STANDING, of which the plaintiff has none, severely jeopardizes the lives and welfare of the people who work, and will be working, at the White House — including all future Presidents of the United States, and their families. President DONALD J. TRUMP

During oral argument, Judge Leon apparently refused to discuss standing, and told the lawyer from DOJ to take up standing with the Court of Appeals.

This post goes more to the merits, and explains the underground construction cannot be separated from the aboveground construction. Standing comes in at the end.

The White House doesn't have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn't get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom, one with Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass —which all means that no future President, living in the White House without this Ballroom, can ever be Safe and Secure at Events, Future Inaugurations, or Global Summits. This Magnificent Space will allow them to carry out their vital duties as the Leader of our Nation. Furthermore, the Ballroom, which is being constructed on budget and ahead of schedule, is needed now. Almost all material necessary for its construction is being built and/or on its way to the site, ready for installation and erection. Much of it has already been paid for, costing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. If somebody, especially one with no standing, had a complaint — Why wasn't it filed many months earlier, long before Construction was started? The Public Record was open for all to see. Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Finally, Trump thinks that Judge Leon works for Chief Judge Boasberg, who was MANDAMUSED.

A Trump Hating Judge, for the first time in History, wants Congress to pay Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for a Glorious Ballroom, instead of accepting Donations from Great American Companies and Citizens. This is a first — In other words, he wants Tax Payers to pay for the Ballroom, instead of Donors and Patriots! The Ballroom is FREE to our Country, A GIFT, and vital for our National Security. This Judge, who works for another Judge who was just MANDAMUSED for the unfair and biased way he treats me, should be ashamed of himself! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Know who can't get mandamused? The President. Say what you will about Trump, but he gets procedure.

The post Trump Tweets About Standing! appeared first on Reason.com.

The Slowing of Fourth Amendment Law, and Now Advisory Opinions: A Comment on Chatrie v. United States

2026-04-16T21:36:12Z

On April 27th, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Chatrie v. United States, on the Fourth Amendment implications of geofencing. I have already posted the amicus brief I wrote for the Court in the case, and I am writing a series of posts in anticipation of the argument. This is the second post in the series.

In this second post, I want to focus on how the Court hasn't handed down a case on the Fourth Amendment and new technology in a long time, and that it is now doing so in what amounts to an advisory opinion. These two things are related, I think. And for those of us interested in how Fourth Amendment law develops, they're related in an important way.

First, consider the timing. Chatrie comes after a surprisingly long gap in Supreme Court attention to how the Fourth Amendment should apply to new technologies. It has been 8 years since the Court's 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States on the Fourth Amendment implications of cell-site location information. That's a relatively long gap. After City of Ontario v. Quon in 2010 on pagers, United States v. Jones in 2012 on GPS devices, Riley v. California in 2014 on searching cell phones incident to arrest, the Microsoft warrant case in 2018, and Carpenter that same year, it had become a staple of the Justices' speeches that Court was going to have to take a lot of cases on the Fourth Amendment and digital technologies in the future.

Instead, for eight years, we get bupkes.

Next, ponder the advisory-opinion aspect of the case. The cert petition in the case asked the Court to take on two issues: Was the Fourth Amendment violated, and does the exclusionary rule apply? In the proceedings below, the fifteen judges on the en banc Fourth Circuit were hopelessly divided on the Fourth Amendment issues—but only one of the fifteen Judges thought the exclusionary rule applied. Instead of taking both issues, the Supreme Court granted cert limited to the first issue.

Think about that. Even if the Court holds that Chatrie's Fourth Amendment rights were violated, it won't make any difference to Chatrie. The lower court has already held that there is no remedy, and that is a retrospective question unaffected by what the Supreme Court might rule on the merits in coming months. Going forward, the Court gets to hand down what is in a practical sense an advisory opinion on how the Fourth Amendment applies to geofencing. Many people care a great deal about what that practically-speaking-advisory-opinion will say, of course. But the actual individual involved, Chatrie, won't get relief.

What is going on? I think these two points are directly linked.

The common origin is the Supreme Court's cutting back on the exclusionary rule, and in particular its rulings like Davis v. United States in 2011 and earlier cases like Herring in 2009. The basic thinking of these cases is that it's wrong to punish the government with suppression of evidence if the government wasn't culpable for doing what it did. If the government didn't do something it should have known was illegal, there shouldn't be a suppression remedy.

Some will like that approach, and others won't. But think about how that changes Fourth Amendment litigation. When you mix that principle with the novel questions of new technologies, there is usually an exclusionary rule "out" when a defendant moves to suppress evidence in a case on new technology. By virtue of the issue being technologically novel, the government will not have been culpable for trying out the technique it used. And that will often mean that judges can avoid reaching the merits of how the Fourth Amendment applies by relying on the good faith exception.

It's not hard to think about what this does to Fourth Amendment litigation. Indeed, my sense is that, since Davis in 2011, caselaw development on the Fourth Amendment and new technology has noticeably slowed. Fourth Amendment caselaw as a whole has slowed, too. A few years ago, I had a research assistant look into this: There were fewer circuit court merits rulings on the Fourth Amendment in 2022 than in 2002 or 1982. But the technology cases have been hardest hit. It's just harder to get a merits ruling on the Fourth Amendment and technology than it used to be, and that has meant less caselaw development.

We have seen a taste of this dynamic in lower court cases I have blogged about before, like the computer search cases of United States v. Ganias in 2015 from the Second Circuit and United States v. Morton from the Fifth Circuit in 2022. Both were fascinating panel rulings. But in both cases, the United States successfully petitioned for rehearing en banc, and the en banc courts handed down opinions saying the good faith exception applied and expressing no views on the merits. We still don't know what the law is on the questions those courts addressed, either in those circuits or in other circuits.

And what's happening in circuit courts is just the tip of the iceberg.

After all, to get to a circuit court, someone needs to have pressed the argument below. And the real problem in Fourth Amendment litigation these days is just getting defense lawyers to file challenges in trial courts. Today's criminal defense lawyers know not to bother with novel Fourth Amendment arguments involving digital technologies. Even if you have what looks like a good argument on the merits, the novelty of the claim itself means you probably lack a remedy. And lacking a remedy, you won't bother filing the motion to suppress. There's no point in filing if you don't have a remedy even if you're right.

I have learned this first-hand with my draft motion to suppress Internet records seized by unlawful Internet preservation. Defense lawyers just have to fill in their client's name and add the date of preservation and they can file it. I think it's a seriously good argument on the merits, and I know prosecutors who are worried about defense lawyers filing such motions because they realize that the arguments against them are strong. But it's been pretty much impossible to get defense lawyers to file the motion. The problem is that the argument is novel. It is saying that an existing practice has major constitutional limits that haven't been spotted before. For a lot of defense lawyers, that basic feature means there is no point in filing. Again, there's no point in challenging the government if you don't have a remedy even if you're right.

What does this have to do with the long gap in Fourth Amendment cases and the advisory nature of the case? The long gap is probably obvious. The Supreme Court waits for circuit splits and percolation. But with defense attorneys not interested in challenging government practices, litigation over those practices is more rare, and you don't get the cases to generate a split. Fewer splits means fewer plausible cert petitions, and that means a long window with no grants.

The advisory nature of the case is also part of the story. The slowing of Fourth Amendment caselaw in the lower courts creates pressure on the Supreme Court to speed things along. If you want to create clarity on what the law is, you don't want the "out" of the good-faith exception. You want to forget the remedy entirely, and just focus entirely on the merits. This is just speculation, of course, but I would guess that this is why the Justices decided to grant cert only on the merits—denying cert on whether the good-faith exception applied. Limiting the cert grant serves a forcing function. It makes both the lawyers briefing the case, and the Justices deciding it, focus on the law-clarifying questions of how the Fourth Amendment applies.

In a sense, this is a variation of what I proposed back in 2011, in my article Fourth Amendment Remedies and Development of the Law: A Comment on Camreta v. Greene and Davis v. United States. In that 2011 essay, I predicted that Davis and similar cases were going to cause a future slowing of the development of Fourth Amendment law. (I argued and lost Davis, and had written about this problem before Davis, so this has been a longstanding concern of mine.) I suggested in that essay that one way to help along that development was for the Justices to be active in adding questions presented. In effect, they should fill in closely related questions that would have been the subject of cert grants if the cases had been litigated, but were not litigated because the incentives to litigate them had been removed.

Limiting the cert grant in Chatrie to the merits seems to me a sort of cousin of that: It doesn't add to the issues in play, but it makes sure that at least some merits issues are reached. Indeed, in some sense the decision to grant in Chatrie is a cousin of that. By (surprisingly) granting cert from a one-line affirmance, the Court gives itself maximum flexibility to address a host of issues in the case.

Next up: Some thoughts on where the Court might go if they take on what is a "search."

The post The Slowing of Fourth Amendment Law, and Now Advisory Opinions: A Comment on Chatrie v. United States appeared first on Reason.com.

San Jose's 'Creepy' and 'Deeply Intrusive' ALPR Camera System Is Unconstitutional, a New Lawsuit Says

2026-04-16T21:39:10Z

Five years ago, police in San Jose, California, began using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to record information about vehicles traveling through the city. The initial experiment involved four Flock Safety cameras at a single intersection. Today the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) has access to data captured by a network of 474 ALPR cameras that blanket the city, recording residents as they go about their daily lives.

More than 1,000 SJPD employees are authorized to search that information, which does not require a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion of involvement in criminal activity. Because San Jose shares its information, it also can be perused by people at nearly 300 other government agencies across California.

That "creepy" and "deeply intrusive" surveillance system violates the Fourth Amendment, the Institute for Justice argues in a lawsuit it filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. "Government employees search San Jose drivers' data thousands of times every day with almost no oversight, creating a situation that's ripe for abuse," warns Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer.

The lawsuit involves three named plaintiffs, but it aims to represent a class consisting of "all San Jose residents who were drivers of vehicles" that have been photographed by the city's cameras during the last year or will be photographed in the future. The plaintiffs are seeking a court order that would require the SJPD to delete or block access to images and data collected by the cameras after 24 hours unless it has "a specific warrant based on probable cause" or invokes a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.

The SJPD initially retained ALPR information for a year, paying Flock, which installs the devices and charges rent for them, an extra $300 per camera to store the data for that long. "There is no need for that information," the city's digital privacy officer conceded in 2024. "It is strictly what our attorney's office has decided is the current interpretation." That interpretation changed in response to a public outcry, and the SJPD currently keeps the data for a month, which is Flock's default.

Despite that concession, the city is still collecting a huge amount of information about the locations and itineraries of drivers. In 2024, the ALPR system recorded more than 360 million images. "Thousands of government employees across California have
access to this massive trove," the lawsuit notes, "and they search it with abandon—nearly 2.5 million times in the last six months of 2025, an average of over 15,000 searches per day."

Although that database is supposed to help detect and prevent crime, "only a tiny sliver of those photographs" prove "relevant to law enforcement," the complaint says. In 2024, for example, about 0.25 percent of those 360 million or so images corresponded to one of the SJPD's "hotlists," which include stolen vehicles, drivers with outstanding warrants, criminal suspects, and missing persons.

The lawsuit explains how the city's ALPR cameras, combined with artificial intelligence software, license plate databases, video camera footage, and ALPR data from other jurisdictions, have enabled routine, far-reaching surveillance that was financially and technologically infeasible until recently. It is a situation that would have dismayed the Fourth Amendment's framers.

In addition to license plate numbers, which can easily be connected to names, addresses, and other personal information, police can search "vehicle fingerprints" that Flock's software generates based on each car's characteristics. The software also can produce a "vehicle journey map" showing "everywhere the car has been seen," the complaint notes. It can be used to "analyze patterns of movement," "flag repeat visitors to a location," "identify vehicles frequently seen together," "generate lists of vehicles that have visited multiple locations of interest," and "predict the future route a vehicle might take."

Nearly all of this information involves innocent people who have done nothing to justify police attention. It includes data that can reveal a person's work and shopping habits, relationships, and visits to locations such as health care facilities, immigration lawyers' offices, houses of worship, and political protests.

"All of this is done without a warrant," the lawsuit notes. "No officer ever has to establish probable cause, swear to the facts in a warrant application, or await the approval of a judge. Instead, all they need to do is log in and enter a vague justification to pull up monthly logs of people's movements. Because of this, officers can run searches based on a hunch, idle curiosity, or even personal animus. Around the country, officers have been caught using ALPR databases to stalk their ex-partners, monitor protestors, and even track down a woman who reportedly had an abortion."

Given such dangers, what safeguards has San Jose established to prevent abuse of its digital dragnet? The SJPD's ALPR policy says the cameras may not be used to "collect data that is not within the public view," "monitor individual or group activities legally allowed in" California or "protected by the First Amendment," aid immigration enforcement, issue "automated citations…without manual review," or collect data for profit. But "in practice," the lawsuit says, "SJPD employees commonly search ALPR data without probable cause, a warrant, or individualized suspicion."

Because judicial approval is not required, the SJPD's official restrictions can be easily evaded. Although the information is not supposed to be used for immigration enforcement, for example, federal officials can and do gain access to it because it is widely shared across the state. According to the complaint, the city "has admitted that federal agencies," including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), "were able to get 'side-door' access" by "asking friendly California law enforcement officers to run searches."

That workaround is potentially problematic not just for unauthorized residents but also for U.S. citizens who oppose the Trump administration's deportation campaign. The lead plaintiff, Tony Tan, is a software engineer who grew up in China. Tan "goes to protests in downtown San Jose and across the Bay Area," the complaint says. He "also volunteers as a legal observer to monitor ICE activity in San Jose and inform people of their rights."

Tan "has heard stories of ICE and other law enforcement officers retaliating against people who criticized or opposed them," the lawsuit says. ICE agents, for example, have been "accused of using license plates to identify legal observers, so that [they] can show up at their homes or place them on watchlists." As Tan sees it, "the Flock Cameras make that type of retaliation all too easy" by "placing an unprecedented record of people's movements across a city in the hands of so many officers without any judicial oversight."

Tan's background makes him especially sensitive to such risks. "As an engineer specializing in privacy, I know how important it is to protect people's data and how even just a few points of location history can reveal profound and sensitive insights about a person's life," he says. "Having spent time in China, I know what an authoritarian surveillance state looks like, and I worry about the proliferation of similar mass surveillance technologies across the United States. I want to ensure that police state tactics do not become commonplace here."

San Jose's ALPR system has "the potential to reveal where [Tan] goes, what he does, and whom he associates with in a way that would have been impossible in the past," the lawsuit notes. If a private individual "created a similar record of his movements," it adds, Tan "would consider it stalking." He "finds this creepy," the complaint says. "It reminds him of the Chinese surveillance state."

According to Tan's lawyers, San Jose's ALPR system is unconstitutional as well as creepy because it "violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as objectively reasonable"—the Fourth Amendment test that the Supreme Court established in the 1967 case Katz v. United States. Historically, they note, Americans expected that "the government would not and could not create a retrospective catalogue of every person's movements across hundreds of strategically chosen locations in a city." San Jose's use of ALPR cameras, the plaintiffs argue, "contravenes society's traditional expectation of privacy by generating a long-term, retrospective, and easy-to-search government database of people's movements, with no requirement that police have a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion to collect or search the data."

That conclusion is consistent with the logic of the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, which held that warrantless tracking via cellphone location data violated the Fourth Amendment. Like the data collection at issue in that case, San Jose's ALPR system can reveal detailed information about an individual's past whereabouts and travels.

The Fourth Amendment "prohibits searches, including electronic surveillance, unless the government has obtained a specific warrant supported by probable cause," the complaint notes. "This requirement is subject only to a few, narrow exceptions. None of these exceptions apply to Defendants' warrantless, suspicionless operation of the Flock Cameras."

This lawsuit is part of an Institute for Justice project that aims to curtail abuse of ALPR cameras, which have proliferated across the country in recent years. Flock alone has installed some 90,000 cameras in more than 5,000 local jurisdictions. The company says its "mission" is "to eliminate crime" by "collect[ing] the objective evidence police need to solve crime, which includes license plates and vehicle information." Flock is unfazed by civil liberties concerns about that mission. Garrett Langley, the company's president, says his goal is "a Flock camera on every street corner."

The post San Jose's 'Creepy' and 'Deeply Intrusive' ALPR Camera System Is Unconstitutional, a New Lawsuit Says appeared first on Reason.com.

Did the Media Miss the Eric Swalwell Story?

2026-04-16T21:39:58Z

Last week, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.) was a high-profile member of Congress (the sort of anti-Trump #Resistance figure who appeared regularly on MSNOW) and the leading Democratic candidate to be the next governor of California. Today, he's a disgraced ex-candidate and ex-congressman.

Swalwell has quit both jobs following numerous sexual misconduct claims reported on by the San Francisco Chronicle and also CNN. Five women have alleged varying levels of improper behavior: The most serious accusation, made by Lonna Drewes, involves rape. She says that Swalwell lured her to his hotel room and choked her while sexually assaulting her. For his part, Swalwell has tacitly confessed to infidelity but denies that he forced himself on anyone.

"These accusations of sexual assault are flat false," he said. "I will fight them with everything I have."

Given all this, Swalwell's resignation seems appropriate, though I would remind everyone that it is difficult to parse the truth of sexual misconduct accusations that surface years after the fact. Alleged victims deserve to be heard and respected, not automatically believed. Numerous men in politics have been accused of long-ago misdeeds that are impossible to properly vet and therefore mostly ignored—including former President Joe Biden, whose campaign was hardly derailed by an accusation from ex-staffer Tara Reade 30 years after the fact.

Moreover, Swalwell's exit from Congress was prompted by the fact that his colleagues had planned to expel him over the allegations. While it's hardly a tragedy when politicians lose their jobs (I'm all in favor of throw the bums out!), I am very reluctant to endorse the idea that a congressman should be tossed over unproven accusations contrary to basic norms of fairness and due process. Swalwell's constituents chose him to be their guy, and I generally think that it's the voters' responsibility to decide who represents them in Congress, not other legislators.

I say that as someone who finds Swalwell a fairly ridiculous and gullible political figure and a terrible choice for governor of California. The good news for Democrats is that they have numerous other choices: far-left billionaire Tom Steyer, former Rep. Katie Porter (who is herself accused of some nasty behavior), the comparatively moderate San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, and others. The bad news for Democrats is that currently the two highest polling candidates are both Republicans, which could actually result in the Democrats getting shut out of the general election. Additional consolidation is clearly necessary.

Which brings me to my next question, and one I've seen various conservatives asking on social media this week: Why now? At first blush, it does seem rather strange that the accusations against Swalwell would take so long to come out. CNN's Brian Stelter described the Swalwell story as a "testament to the power of investigative reporting," and there's some truth to that. The Chronicle and CNN reporters did a great job, but still. Swalwell has been a major national Democratic figure for years. He even ran for president in 2020!

Eric Swalwell ending his bid for California governor is, among other things, a testament to the power of investigative reporting pic.twitter.com/4xzUg944dt

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 13, 2026

Additionally, he's been a constant fixture on progressive and mainstream media programs. Per usual, now that the story is out there, one encounters all sorts of Democratic staffers, politicos, and media figures whispering that they had heard the gossip about him for years. It takes a lot of work for a media reporter to hit publish on a story that contains such weighty accusations, but I find it strange that no one tried back in 2020, particularly with #MeToo still being a major topic of interest for the media at the time.

That said, conservatives inclined to complain about this might consider whether their own media institutions also missed the story. After all, there was nothing stopping them from digging into it, but that means investing in real reporting talent, not just clickbait and hot takes.

This Week on Free Media

I discuss Swalwell's exit with Amber Duke. Also, on Freed Up, Christian Britschgi challenges me to guess: death metal album or military operation? Play along!

Worth Watching

I finished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I did not enjoy, and have returned to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series. Next up: Pocketful of Rye.

The post Did the Media Miss the Eric Swalwell Story? appeared first on Reason.com.

Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran

2026-04-16T21:39:40Z

During a worship service at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth read a prayer to bless the government's war efforts in Iran, which "was shared to him by the lead planner" of the Combat Search and Rescue operation (CSAR) that "rescued two Air Force crew members shot down over Iran," reports USA Today.

"The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men," Hegseth read. "Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen."

The prayer, known as CSAR 25:17, is "meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17," according to Hegseth. This passage foretells a "great vengeance" against ancient Israel's enemies for taking "revenge with malice in their hearts" against the nation. While CSAR 25:17 is supposedly meant to "reflect" scripture, it reads closer to Samuel L. Jackson's monologic prayer from Pulp Fiction. In it, Jackson's hitman character declares that "the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men" and "you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you," before killing a guy who had been stealing from his boss.

Hegseth's Wednesday prayer was not the first time he has used scripture or the Christian faith out of context to support the administration's illegal war. Last month, in the first Pentagon worship service since the war started, Hegseth used a mix of Bible verses and metaphors to ask God to "break the teeth" of the Iranian oppressors and give the United States success in its efforts. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said that God supports the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran because "God wants to see people taken care of." Comments like these led Pope Leo XIV on Thursday to condemn "a handful of tyrants" who "manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military…and political gain."

Indeed, the Trump world has time and again exploited the faith of the president's supporters to further a political agenda that expands the state's power and perpetuates civil liberties violations. In February 2025, the president signed an executive order that established a federal task force to "eradicate anti-Christian bias" in the U.S., which the Interfaith Alliance recently warned will "weaponize a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimize discrimination against marginalized groups," including the LGBT community.

After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents earlier this year, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) defended the administration's deportation campaign on Facebook by citing Romans 13, where apostle Paul directs Christians to submit to "governing authorities." The post received backlash from the faith community, including from Benjamin Cremer, a pastor who writes about the intersection of politics and Christianity, who called Johnson's interpretation of the scripture "to sanctify a vision of government authority that demands submission while refusing accountability….not a faithful reading of the text."

In Oklahoma, Christian nationalist politicians have tried to force their beliefs by proposing strict penalties on pornography and mandating Bibles—notably, Trump-endorsed Bibles—in classrooms. Louisiana, meanwhile, recently saw its law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms struck down in court and later allowed to temporarily proceed in some districts while the legal battle continues.

Hegseth may very well believe that the U.S. is fighting a holy war in Iran and that God is on his side. But as the Trump administration has repeatedly shown, when politicians use faith to justify expansions of the state and illiberal policies, Americans ought to be skeptical of their motivations and the movement that brought them into power.

The post Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran appeared first on Reason.com.

62-Year-Old Protester Acquitted on All Charges for Wearing Penis Costume

2026-04-16T17:04:15Z

This week, a 62-year-old Alabama woman faced a criminal trial for wearing an inflatable penis costume during a protest.

After three hours of testimony, a judge acquitted her of all charges—a welcome result for her free speech rights.

In October 2025, Jeana Renea Gamble wore the offending phallus—holding a "No Dick-Tator" sign—at a "No Kings" protest. Responding to the scene, Cpl. Andrew Babb of the Fairhope Police Department threw Gamble to the ground and arrested her for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Prosecutors later added charges of disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement—the latter because when she was asked her name, Gamble replied "Aunt Tifa," a play on antifa, the shorthand used by antifascist activists.

The case was flawed from the start: Babb's body camera footage shows his tone was aggressive as soon as he arrived, and he threw her to the ground less than a minute after arriving, even though she was walking away from him at the time.

Besides, wearing an offensive costume is fully protected by the First Amendment.

Predictably, the prosecution faced an uphill battle. Judge Haymes Snedeker dropped the false name charge before the trial even began. And prosecutors struggled to establish why Gamble should even have been arrested in the first place, much less prosecuted.

"She was obstructing traffic and was a safety risk," Babb testified at trial, adding that he tried to de-escalate the situation. The prosecution played "a single non-emergency phone call to police from a driver who was offended by the display," according to Courthouse News.

But as defense attorney David Gespass noted, that wasn't what Babb said on the scene. Bodycam footage shows that before he threw Gamble to the ground, Babb had only objected to her costume, demanding to know "how you would explain to my children what you're supposed to be." Even after the arrest, Babb took a phone call in which he says he told Gamble, "This is a family town….Being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated." He never says anything about Gamble obstructing traffic.

"That's all he talked about when he was confronting her was, 'I am not going to put up with this in my town,'" Gespass said at trial. "Certainly, if you watch the video, he is not de-escalating anything. He approached her aggressively."

"There is no constitutional right to wear a total erect penis on the side of the road," said prosecuting attorney Marcus McDowell. "It was in the middle of the day, and during a [youth] baseball season."

"Imagine going to the trouble of going to law school, passing the bar, standing up in front of a judge, and being this wrong," First Amendment attorney Adam Steinbaugh of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression responded on X, adding, "This may be the most eye-rolling invocation of 'what about the children' I've heard."

Ultimately, the judge was unswayed. "There was probable cause for arrest, but I can't convict and sentence someone unless I'm sure," Snedeker said, acquitting on all charges. Gespass, Gamble's attorney, disagreed about the probable cause and said they may sue the department for violating Gamble's First Amendment rights.

"Free speech wins!" Gamble proclaimed after the acquittal, addressing the crowd of supporters that had gathered outside the courthouse. "We have civil rights in Fairhope!"

"We have some growing and relearning to do about the rights the citizens of this town have," she added. "And as Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over."

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Justice Ginsburg Cancer Treatment Leak Prosecution: Blame the Cat

2026-04-16T16:37:39Z

From U.S. v. Russell, decided Tuesday by Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz, joined by Judges Robert King and Stephanie Thacker:

Before Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, … [i]n January 2019, employees at George Washington University Hospital discovered a Twitter post that revealed information about Justice Ginsburg's recent visits to the hospital. The post contained a screenshot of the hospital's patient search screen, which highlighted Justice Ginsburg's name and showed the dates of ten visits, along with medical services she received (which included radiology, oncology, and surgery services)….

Law enforcement later learned that before circulating on Twitter, the screenshot was posted on the anonymous message board 4Chan. It appeared on a thread titled "Politically Incorrect," where users promoted a conspiracy theory that Justice Ginsburg had died and prominent Democrats were covering up her death.

The hospital's Chief Information Officer, Nathan Read, investigated the leak. He obtained search logs for anyone who had used the hospital's system to look for patients with last names starting with "Ginsb" in the relevant time frame….

Read's … search parameters revealed that a non-hospital issued device, operating under Russell's username, searched for "Gins" on January 7, 2019. That search was sandwiched between two others. Seconds before, the same device searched for "Barker," and seconds after, it searched for "Ginston." Barker was a hospital patient, but the hospital had no record of ever serving someone with the last name Ginston.

After concluding its investigation, the hospital deactivated Russell's account, notified his employer, and gave Harlow's and Russell's names to law enforcement….

Federal Agents Mosi Forde and Chris Lalonde interviewed Russell at work. The CEO of Russell's company, Lori Brigham, sat in on the interview "because she was concerned about the case and interested in the outcome." Neither Forde nor Lalonde had asked her to attend. Brigham remained silent during the interview, except to once "wonder[ ] aloud what sensitive information could be derived from simply searching someone's name."

The agents told Russell that the interview was voluntary, he was free to leave at any time, and he could decline to answer any questions. According to Forde, Russell's "affect was pleasant and measured" during the interview, and he "appeared to be under no apparent duress."

The agents showed Russell the relevant search logs. He confirmed that the credentials used for the searches belonged to him. Russell also admitted that he'd run the search for "Barker," who was his patient. But Russell denied searching for "Gins" and "Ginston." {At trial, the government argued that Russell searched for "Ginston" to conceal that he was looking for Justice Ginsburg's health records.}

When asked what "Gins" stood for, Russell said that "if he had to take a guess, it was Justice Ginsburg." The agents hadn't yet mentioned the Justice's name in the interview. Russell also "guessed" that the agents were speaking with him "because someone had taken a screenshot of Justice Ginsburg's medical record."

Russell insisted that he didn't know how his credentials had been used to run the "Gins" and "Ginston" searches. But he theorized that "potentially his cat had run across the keyboard and typed in those letters." He also suggested that the searches could be typos or that a coworker may have used his login information….

Russell was prosecuted, and convicted of "destroying and altering records, and … obtaining individually identifiable health information," and acquitted "of disclosing individually identifiable health information." He was sentenced to 2 years in prison.

The court concluded there was enough evidence to sustain the conviction:

The jury convicted Russell under 42 U.S.C. § 1320d-6(a)(2), which prohibits "obtain[ing] individually identifiable health information relating to an individual." This includes any information that

(A) is created or received by a health care provider … and

(B) relates to the past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition of an individual, the provision of health care to an individual, or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to an individual, and—

(i) identifies the individual; or

(ii) with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual.

A person violates the statute "if the information is maintained by a covered entity … and the individual obtained … such information without authorization." Healthcare providers like George Washington University Hospital are covered entities….

Russell argues that the information about Justice Ginsburg in the screenshot doesn't qualify as "individually identifiable health information." Although he admits the screenshot showed that the Justice received medical care from the hospital, Russell asks us to limit the statute's application to individuals who obtain "information about [a patient's] specific health conditions," such as "details about the [patient's] particular physician and type of treatment." In Russell's view, because the screenshot didn't disclose the precise nature of Justice Ginsburg's illness or the names of her doctors, it can't serve as the basis for his conviction.

We reject this crabbed view of the statute. The screenshot identified the Justice by name and disclosed where she was being treated, her arrival and discharge dates, and the medical services provided, which included radiology and oncology services. As a witness testified, this information revealed that Justice Ginsburg "had been receiving treatment from [the hospital] for various things related to cancer seemingly since at least 2014."

This information falls well within the heartland of the conduct the statute is aimed at because it "relates to the past … health or condition of an individual, [and] the provision of health care to an individual." To hold otherwise would flout the spirit of the law. At the very least, a reasonable juror could accept that the screenshot contained personal health information sufficient to support a conviction under § 1320d-6(a)(2).

And the court held that the CEO's presence during the interview didn't make Russell's statements to law enforcement "involuntary" for legal purposes and thus inadmissible:

[T]he district court didn't say that implied threats to employment can never be coercive. It simply found that there was no such threat here. Russell didn't identify a case where "the mere presence of the employer or the CEO [in a conversation with law enforcement] could be construed as a threat, implicit or explicit." …

The district court concluded that "there's nothing in the record that suggests that the interaction between the agents and [Russell] involved coercive police activity, either in the words that were spoken or in their actions[,]" [because] … (1) Russell was an English-speaking adult with higher education; (2) law enforcement questioned him in a conference room with windows and at least one unlocked door; (3) the agents told Russell that he "was free to leave at any time, [and] that the interview was voluntary"; (4) the agents didn't brandish weapons or any other indicia of force or coercion; (5) Russell "felt free to admit certain inculpatory evidence"; and (6) the agents hadn't asked the CEO to attend the interview.

Given these findings, the CEO's presence (without more) doesn't rise to the level of coercive police activity. So the district court correctly denied the motion to suppress.

Lauren Nicole Beebe and Zoe Bedell represent the government.

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Congress Declines Again To Rein in Trump's Iran War

2026-04-16T21:40:53Z

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch (R–Idaho) has never believed that now is the right time to vote on war with Iran. "There is no clear line of delineation between actual war and the use of kinetic force," he said during a war powers debate in 2020, adding that President Donald Trump has used force "very sparingly" against Iran. "This is not the start of a forever war," Risch said after Trump launched a one-off air raid against Iran in June 2025.

Now that Trump has started an undeniable, no-kidding war with no clear ending, Risch believes that a war powers resolution would unfairly tell the President to "put your tail between your legs and run."

Risch got what he wanted on Wednesday night when the Senate voted 47–52 against a war powers resolution, which would have forced the president to either get congressional approval for the war or end it. It was the fourth attempt to pass a war powers resolution in the Senate since the war began. Every single one went exactly the same way: All Republicans except libertarian-adjacent Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted for the war, and all Democrats except the pro-Israel heavyweight Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) voted against the war.

On Thursday morning, the same resolution failed in the House of Representatives in the same way, with every Democrat except Rep. Jared Golden (D–Maine) voting to end the war, and every Republican except for the libertarian-adjacent Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) voting to continue it.

The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a temporary ceasefire to allow for peace talks. After walking out of negotiations last weekend, the Trump administration declared it was enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports. Trump and his advisers insist that they are ready to resume fighting once the ceasefire expires next week. "We are reloading with more power than ever before. We are locked and loaded," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters on Thursday morning.

Members of Congress are more supportive of the war than the people who elected them. On average, polls at the beginning of the war showed that 43 percent of Americans disapproved of it, compared to only 35 percent who approved. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire on April 8, disapproval stood at 53–38. A poll released by Reuters and Ipsos on Tuesday shows that only 24 percent of Americans think the war has been worth it, and 54 percent think that the war has made their personal financial situation worse.

That may be why the war's supporters in Congress want to avoid voting on it—and why the opposition insists on doing so. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has promised weekly war powers votes to force senators to go on the record. Democrats have signaled that they are going to make the cost of the war a major issue in the midterm congressional elections. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), sponsor of Tuesday's resolution, said that it would force Republicans to "prove that they're actually putting America first."

One cop-out by the administration and its supporters has been to simply deny that a war ever took place. On March 6, after voting down a war powers resolution, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) insisted that "we are not at war." Three days later, Trump himself called it a "war." A few days later, Trump insisted that the "military operation" should not be called a "war" because "as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war, you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that."

Another cop-out has been insisting that Congress has 60 days before it can weigh in on war under the War Powers Act. That's not quite true. While the War Powers Act sets a 60 day deadline for the president to "terminate" an undeclared war, it also states that the president can only "introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities" under an authorization from Congress or "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States," and has to "consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities."

Still, Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine), James Lankford (R–Okla.), and John Curtis (R–Utah) used the 60-day deadline as an excuse to vote against the war powers resolution on Tuesday while insisting that they support some limits on war powers, at some point in time. "I support the president's actions [in Iran] taken in defense of American lives and interests. However, I will not support ongoing military action beyond a 60-day window without congressional approval," Curtis wrote in an article for Deseret News.

During the debate on Tuesday's resolution, Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) proverbially rolled his eyes at the idea that his colleagues would actually "jump up and say that's it, it's one second past 60 days, everybody come home." After all, Collins has already backed down on her previous war powers position; she supported war powers resolutions in February 2020 and January 2026 to restrain actions far short of Trump's all-out attack on Iran.

The same day that the Senate voted on the war powers resolution, it also voted on two bills by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to block weapons shipments to the Israeli military, which attacked Iran alongside U.S. forces. Both of them failed, but gained much more support than Sanders' last attempt. On Wednesday night, 36 senators voted against a shipment of bombs and 40 voted against a shipment of armored bulldozers. All Republicans—along with Schumer, Fetterman, and four other Democrats—voted for both shipments.

Although bombs may seem more controversial than bulldozers, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) explained to the Jewish Insider that the split voters considered the bulldozers to be a referendum on Israel's rule over the Palestinian territories and the bombs to be a referendum on its war with Iran. "The United States should ensure that Israel has the tools it needs to protect its people and deter its adversaries while opposing transfers of equipment that are used to demolish homes, expand settlements, and further entrench a reality that weakens the already fragile prospects for a durable peace" with Palestinians, he said.

The two may not be so easy to separate in reality. In Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah, the Israeli army is "behaving just like we did in Gaza. There's a list of homes to be demolished, and we measure success based on the number of buildings destroyed in a day," an army source told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Nonetheless, the Senate vote is an indicator of falling American public support for the Israeli government. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans under the age of 50. Similar numbers do not trust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "do the right thing," according to the poll.

Overconfident in the level of pro-Israel public sentiment, the Trump administration first justified the war with Iran in terms of protecting Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the U.S. joined the war because "we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action," and Trump said the next day that he had to fight Iran because "they were getting ready to attack Israel." Faced with unexpected backlash, the administration scrambled to backtrack.

Clock Tower X, a firm run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, released a pro-war YouTube ad a few days before the ceasefire. "This decision wasn't about Israel. It was about our safety," the ad states. "This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel," it concludes.

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Who Owns The President's Papers?

2026-04-16T16:05:59Z

The Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is unconstitutional. In Civitas Outlook, I explained why I thought this opinion was consistent with recent Supreme Court precedents, including Trump v. Mazars.

Others, unsurprisingly, disagree. Christopher Fonzone, who headed OLC during the Biden Administration, writes that the PRA is constitutional. Here, I want to focus on one aspect of Fonzone's analysis: who owns the President's papers?

Fonzone writes:

First and foremost, the Property Clause. Article IV of the Constitution expressly grants Congress the "Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting" U.S. property. Since the Constitution and Congress create and fund all of the offices in the White House, those offices are unquestionably government offices. As OLC recognized in the 1978 testimony concerning the constitutionality of the PRA, "[i]t is well established that the work product of government employees prepared at the direction of their employer or in the course of their duties is government property." Thus, Congress may "extend this principle" to require the preservation of "records prepared or received by the President in the course of his duties" and "no substantial separation of powers problems would, in our view, be raised." (As I discuss below, the April 1, 2026 OLC opinion includes no discussion of the Property Clause.)

The Carter Administration may have reached this conclusion, but (thankfully) one executive branch cannot bind another executive branch--especially one that was "especially pleased" to acquiesce to so many congressional constraints on presidential power.

Fonzone does not mention that the Supreme Court expressly left this issue open in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977):

We see no reason to engage in the debate whether appellant [President Nixon] has legal title to the materials. . . .

The litigation over Nixon's records did not end in 1978. There was extensive caselaw that stretched decades. In 1992, the D.C. Circuit stated that the papers did belong to Nixon:

The government has, pursuant to PRMPA, taken complete possession and control of the Nixon papers. Although a great public interest may justify a taking, it does not convert the taking into mere regulation. Here, the few rights that Mr. Nixon retains in the materials are so fractured that his original property interest has been destroyed. Indeed, the rights that have been granted to Mr. Nixon are so modest that they cannot be equated with "property." In such a case, we have little difficulty in concluding that PRMPA constitutes a per se taking of Mr. Nixon's property.

For those who keep track, the panel opinion was written by Judge Harry Edwards, and Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined it in full.

The recent OLC opinion mentions the 1992 case⁠ and points out that the Presidential Records Act nowhere authorizes payment of just compensation: ". . . we note that the PRA is plainly not an attempt to exercise the power of eminent domain: Unlike the PRMPA, it contains no just-compensation provision."

And wait, there's more! The Domestic Emoluments Clause is relevant. Seth Barrett Tillman and I discussed this issue in our contribution to the Heritage Guide to the Constitution:

After President Richard Nixon resigned from office, the General Services Administration (GSA) took custody of certain materials from the Nixon presidency. Nixon sued the government to retain control of these papers, recordings, and other items. Nixon claimed that these materials were his property. But the government argued that "the salary and benefits provided to Mr. Nixon by the United States during his presidency were the only economic benefits the United States could have provided him."²⁶ As a result, the government claimed, the Domestic Emoluments Clause prohibited Nixon "from receiving any 'emolument' from the United States beyond the compensation fixed by Congress before he . . . took office."²⁷ Moreover, Nixon would be "precluded from taking materials and selling them for personal profit during, or after, his . . . presidency."²⁸ Thus, he was "not entitled to any [further] compensation by virtue of the Emoluments Clause."²⁹ Nixon countered "that since the presidential papers were never public property to begin with, the [Domestic] Emoluments Clause does not apply to them."³⁰

In Griffin v. United States (1995), a federal district court recognized that the Domestic Emoluments Clause "addressed the Framers' concern that the President should not have the ability to convert his or her office for profit."³¹ However, the court also found that the clause "does not bar the award of compensation." This provision applies while a President is in office, but the clause "would not be violated because Mr. Nixon would receive compensation subsequent to the expiration of his term of office."³² Any "proceeds derived from the sale of Mr. Nixon's presidential papers do not constitute an emolument."³³ Past Presidents had negotiated "fancy sums" for "lucrative library deals," and the Library of Congress has "authorized purchases" of materials from Presidents.³⁴ The court declined to address whether "a sitting President could sell his or her papers while in office" because those facts were not presented.³⁵

Griffin is in some tension with an earlier district court decision, Nixon v. Sampson (1975).³⁶ That case held that Nixon's materials from the White House were "directly related to the performance of the Office of the President and are of incalculable value." The judge ruled that it would violate the Domestic Emoluments Clause if the President was "given or . . . permitted to assert a personal right to such materials." Nixon argued that this material was "not an emolument because his right of ownership does not come into existence until he leaves office."³⁷ The court rejected this argument: "[I]f [Nixon's] claim of ownership does not come into existence until he leaves office, then it can only be concluded that while he is in office the documents, papers, tapes and other materials were government property." Sampson was later vacated, and Griffin did not cite Sampson.

The issue of who owns the the President's papers is not a settled question. When an issue is not yet settled by the Supreme Court, the only way to resolve the issue is what I call the Nike approach: "Just do it!" The executive concludes that the PRA is unconstitutional, stops voluntarily complying with it, and waits to be sued. Without such affirmative action, the President will forever be bound by the leadership of Jimmy Carter. In CASA, the Solicitor General stated clearly that lower courts cannot universally bind the executive branch, but the Supreme Court can. And now, the issue will race to SCOTUS.

In other news, the litigation filed by American Oversight to block the implementation of the OLC opinion hit a stumbling block. The group attempted to judge shop the case to Judge Howell, a friendly forum. They listed this case as "related" to a pre-existing case before Judge Howell involving FOIA and DOGE. The government moved to randomly reassign the case, and Judge Howell agreed:

The only basis for relation to American Oversight asserted in plaintiffs' Notice of Related case was that the two cases supposedly "involve common issues of fact." See Pls.' Not. of Related Case (checking the "common issues of fact" box). Belatedly, and somewhat surprisingly, plaintiffs now assert in response to defendants' noticed objection to relating the two cases, that they "mistakenly selected only the box for 'involves common issues of fact,' and not also the box for 'relates to common property,'" and proceed to rely first and most heavily in their opposition on the contention that these cases involve as "common property" the records sought by the plaintiff in American Oversight (the "American Oversight Records"). Pls.' Opp'n at 1-2 & n.1.1 Neither of these prongs in D.D.C. Local Civil Rule 40.5(a)(3)(i) and (ii) provides a basis for relation.

The case was reassigned to Judge Bates.

You see, judge shopping is only bad when conservatives do it. When progressive use chicanery to draw a favored judge, there is no cause for concern. If people wanted to get serious about judge-shopping, the first area of focus is not a few single judge divisions. The rampant abuse of the "related cases" option should be the first priority.

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Federal Judge Delivers Due Process Win Against DOJ Registry Overreach

2026-04-16T15:26:10Z

To protect the fundamental right to due process, a federal judge has permanently blocked the Justice Department (DOJ) from prosecuting Californians who fail to register under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) if the state doesn't require them to do so.

In a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public-interest law firm, four John Does described the impossibility of complying with the DOJ. A rule issued by former Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 required anyone who's ever been convicted of a sex offense to register with their state, regardless of whether their state's laws match the federal requirements. Anyone who fails to fully register faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

This new rule was particularly problematic for individuals who are no longer required, nor permitted, to register as a sex offender in their home state. One plaintiff, identified as John Doe #2, was convicted 21 years ago of a misdemeanor offense for which he spent 60 days in jail, according to the complaint. While he was initially required to register as a sex offender in California, after receiving intensive therapy and "obtain[ing] a master's degree in Social Work to help treat other people with sex addictions," reads the complaint, his conviction was expunged, and he was issued a certificate of rehabilitation. Under California law, he is no longer required to register as a sex offender and is even prohibited from doing so. But under federal law, he was still required to comply with SORNA's registration requirements under threat of prosecution.

Another plaintiff, named in the complaint as John Doe #4, similarly faced the distressing threat of federal prosecution. Although he was required to register with the state at the time the lawsuit was filed (he successfully petitioned to be removed from the registry in 2023), California only required a registrant's address and a copy of their identification. But "the new rule requires much more," Caleb Kruckenburg of the Pacific Legal Foundation told Reason when the lawsuit was filed. "A registrant must include his social security number, his 'remote communication identifiers' (e.g., internet usernames), his work or school information, and information concerning any international travel, passport and vehicle registration, or professional licenses."

The Pacific Legal Foundation says there are thousands of individuals in California alone facing the same penalties for circumstances outside of their control. In 2023, District Judge Jesus G. Bernal issued a preliminary injunction against the DOJ, citing SORNA's inconsistency with due process. "May the Government attempt to imprison California registrants like Plaintiffs for up to a decade for failing to do the impossible, unless they, not the Government, prove impossibility?" wrote Bernal. "This Court holds that the answer is no."

Under the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the government is required to bear the burden of proving all essential elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Under SORNA, however, the government "presumes that Plaintiffs are guilty of a federal crime unless they prove their lack of culpability at trial," Bernal continued. In issuing the now permanent injunction on April 9, Bernal reiterated these due process violations and blocked the DOJ from prosecuting individuals who've failed to fully register without first confirming that the state of California requires the person to register or collects certain information.

"This ruling is an important win for the fundamental principle of due process: the government must bear the burden to prove that someone broke the law," Allison Daniel, a PLF attorney, tells Reason. "It cannot transfer that burden to the accused by requiring that they affirmatively prove they did not."

The post Federal Judge Delivers Due Process Win Against DOJ Registry Overreach appeared first on Reason.com.

'The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share' and 4 Other Tax Myths That Won't Die

2026-04-16T14:45:49Z

Every April, Americans spend more than 7 billion hours filing taxes and roughly the same amount of time arguing over them, almost entirely on the basis of several common myths. Here are the five most consequential.

Myth No. 1: The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share

This is the most repeated claim in American tax politics and one of the least supported by actual data. The top 1 percent of earners take in 22 percent of total income and pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 10 percent earn about half the nation's income and pay 72 percent of its taxes. The bottom half of earners, collectively, pay roughly 3 percent of the tax revenue. The United States, in fact, has the most progressive income-tax system in the developed world.

Myth No. 2: We'll Fix the Budget Deficit by Taxing the Rich

We simply cannot. The collective net worth of every American billionaire is estimated at somewhere around $8 trillion. The projected federal deficit over the next decade alone approaches $25 trillion. Even a one-time total confiscation of every billionaire's wealth wouldn't come close, and you only get to do it once.

The real driver of America's fiscal crisis isn't a shortage of tax revenue from the wealthy. It's the structural growth of Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office projects that such mandatory spending and interest payments will permanently exceed all federal revenue starting next year. No amount you could tax the rich will correct an imbalance like this.

Myth No. 3: If You Can't Tax the Rich, Tax Corporations

Corporations are the next most likely target for those who want large government without the middle class paying for it. The problem is that corporations don't actually pay taxes. Once you understand why, this starts to look like one of the worst ideas in America's tax code.

Corporations write checks to the IRS, but they don't bear the tax burden. Every dollar collected for corporate tax comes from a human: the worker who's paid a lower wage, the shareholder who earns less, and the consumer who pays higher prices at checkout. Research shows that workers bear somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the corporate tax burden through lower wages. If you have a 401(k), you're paying it too, quietly, through lower returns on every stock in the fund.

Further, corporate profits are returns on investment. Tax them and you get less investment. Less investment means lower productivity, which leads to lower wages over time. Decades ago, economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka showed a better way: Replace the corporate income tax with a consumption-based system under which businesses deduct all wages and capital investment immediately. No double taxation, no penalty on investment, and revenue without unintended economic damage.

The corporate tax survives because voters mistakenly believe someone else pays it. This belief is expensive.

Myth No. 4: Capital Gains Should Be Taxed Like Ordinary Income

This proposal sounds like common sense, but it's bad economics. When a company earns a dollar of profit, it pays roughly 26 cents in combined federal and state corporate taxes before distributing the rest to its shareholders. When it's all said and done, the government has taken close to half of every dollar the company earned. That's not a tax on the rich—it's two taxes on the same income.

Those who want to raise capital-gains rates assume the U.S. is a low-tax haven for investors. It's not. America's combined federal, state, and net investment income tax rate on capital gains already sits at 29.2 percent, well above the average of 19.1 percent in fellow Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) democracies. We're already an outlier, and not in a good direction.

Myth No. 5: Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves

Politicians on the right have said this for 40 years. But it's not quite true. Tax rates affect behavior. Cut the marginal rate on work and investment, and you get more of both, which generates more revenue than a static calculation predicts. But generating more revenue than expected is not necessarily enough to cover the cost of the rate cut. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act proved it. Growth picked up, wages rose, business investment increased, yet the deficit still widened.

The honest argument is different: A tax cut that costs real revenue but improves the allocation of capital and raises long-run productivity is still the right policy. The question is not whether tax cuts pay for themselves but whether the economic growth is worthwhile. That's harder to fit on a bumper sticker, but it's the version of the conservative tax argument that actually holds up.

That said, we should always offset the loss of revenue when possible. There is plenty of spending to cut, and there are plenty of tax breaks to close for that.

The post 'The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share' and 4 Other Tax Myths That Won't Die appeared first on Reason.com.

'Blue Power' and the Rise of Police Union Politics

2026-04-16T14:17:03Z

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, by Stuart Schrader. Basic Books, 432 pages, $34

"Everybody else can indulge in politics—every black group, every political party group, every church group," groused Carl Parsell, then president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, in 1969. "Why are police officers so different?"

The question goes to the heart of Stuart Schrader's Blue Power, a new book charting how police unions accreted and cemented power in the decades following Parsell's query.

It's a ripe subject for review: Police officers' savvy use of public sector unions and lobbying to largely immunize themselves from oversight is one of the greatest political coups in recent American history. In under four decades, police unions evolved from beer-drinking clubs to organized bargaining units to potent political forces at the local, state, and national levels.

The idea that those empowered to enforce law and order could also leverage their position to gain more power has always sat uncomfortably in a democratic republic. "Who is going to uphold this order?" a San Francisco judge wondered in the 1970s, when striking officers defied his commands to stop picketing while carrying guns. Schrader argues that law enforcement's victories at the bargaining table and in statehouses have hurt "the very public safety and security that are to be democracy's police-enforced guarantors."

Police misconduct settlements cost cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Arbitration makes it hard to fire officers, even for gross misconduct. At their most militant, police unions threaten to remove departments from any external democratic control, and to capriciously withdraw or overapply their power to punish anyone who would oppose them.

Several recent books have explored the history of individual police departments in major cities and the battles to reform them. The Minneapolis Reckoning covered the Minneapolis Police Department both before and after the killing of George Floyd. The Oakland Police Department's long history of corruption was the subject of The Riders Come Out at Night. Both The Highest Law in the Land and The Power of the Badge examined the unusually powerful office of the county sheriff in American policing and local politics.

But Schrader, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, gives a national perspective, from the birth of police organizing in the 1960s through law enforcement's emergence on the national political stage in the 1980s, the passage of the 1994 crime bill, and the turbulent Black Lives Matter years. What's remarkable is how much the police achieved without a national union or top-down campaign.

Police used the titular phrase blue power in the 1960s as a direct response to the Black Power movement. One 1968 assessment called blue power "the political force by which radicalism, student demonstration, and Black Power can be blocked." (There were less successful efforts to co-opt the language of the Black Power movement, such as when striking Minneapolis officers called for "Pig Power." ) But police organizing was not simply a backlash. One of Schrader's insights, and one of the more interesting threads of the book, is that rank-and-file police organizations stoked public fears of radicals and crime as a tactic in a more concrete fight against administrators.

At the end of the Progressive Era, cities began to untangle their police departments from machine politics and turn them into independent agencies focused on crime control. When the Los Angeles Police Department unveiled a new slogan in 1955, "To Protect and to Serve," it was intended to signal a new era of professionalism. Officers soon discovered that being independent meant having to advocate for their own interests in what they saw as an increasingly hostile world, besieged by radicals on the streets, clueless liberals in Washington, and hostile bosses on the floors above them.

Officers had genuine grievances. Patronage still governed hiring and promotions at several major police departments. In Baltimore in the 1960s, it was normal for police officers to do maintenance and sanitation work around the city while on duty. "Some had been painting walls for so many years they couldn't remember how to write a ticket," Schrader writes.

When Detroit police officers began a ticket-writing slowdown in 1967—supported by the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, and the Detroit chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees— they were protesting a much-hated quota for traffic tickets, which city officials wanted to raise to generate more revenue. The slowdown cost Detroit an estimated $583,000.

Police chiefs were autocrats, and officers had no formal grievance or disciplinary processes to turn to. In Baltimore, Commissioner Donald Pomerlau had an intelligence unit that kept tabs on officers and civilians who were of interest to him. (Asked by a reporter if his intelligence unit spied on elected officials, Pomerleau responded, "Just the blacks. Just the blacks.") Meanwhile, police chiefs used the frequent bribery scandals of the 1960s and 1970s to press for more powerful internal affairs departments.

Schrader's labor-vs.-management framing shows these competing forces as sophisticated political actors in a multifront battle. Police unions learned early on that they could sell relatively dry policies to the public by presenting them as life-and-death matters. For example, when New York City's police unions launched a signature drive in 1966 for a referendum to abolish the mayor's newly created police review board—which would have had no investigative authority or power to make disciplinary recommendations—-the union's public ad campaign was so effective that conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. personally delivered 40,000 signed petitions to the city clerk's desk. ("The civilian review board proposed by Mayor Lindsay is an emotional artifact, designed primarily to soothe the unrealistic fears of a small minority of New York voters who worry without objective justification that the police are regularly guilty of the abuse of their powers," Buckley said.)

Collective bargaining rights and forced arbitration for officers tilted the balance of power away from police chiefs. As police officer unions grew in influence over the 1970s, so did their ambitions and tactics: political lobbying and campaigning, litigation, and retaliatory work actions.

Schrader documents some of police unions' forays into the culture war, such as when the Houston Police Officers' Union sued the Houston punk band AK-47 in 1980 for its single, "The Badge Means You Suck," which listed the names of several people who'd been killed by Houston police in recent years.

But it's the strikes, riots, and other actions that are the most controversial. In addition to sick-outs (waves of what's known as the "blue flu"), officers engaged in malicious compliance or noncompliance to punish cities that refused to meet their demands. In the 1970s, the day after San Francisco voters approved a proposition to cut police wages, police issued three times the normal number of traffic citations.

In one notorious 1992 incident, thousands of New York officers, many of them drunk, surrounded City Hall to protest Mayor David Dinkins' plan to create a civilian review board. They were egged on by future Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and they later marched down the Brooklyn Bridge, blocking traffic. A New York councilwoman said that cops refused to let her enter City Hall and called her the n-word.

Left-wing labor activists have never been quite sure how to square their principles with the existence of right-wing police unions, and Schrader also struggles with this a bit.

"Many public sector unions were militant, but police maintained this militancy long after it had crested among other public employees," he writes. "Most public sector unions experienced setbacks or stasis beginning in the 1980s, but police unions continued to succeed. To this day, with around 7 million unionized public employees in the United States, it is difficult in most cities to consider other unions as part of the same movement as police unions—only one type of union representative approaches the bargaining table or meeting of a city's central labor council packing a pistol."

Of course, other public sector unions such as teachers and sanitation workers know how to apply particular and unpleasant pressure to have their demands met. But the Punisher bumper stickers aren't the only difference; there's another one resting in a holster on most cops' belts. Schrader argues that what makes police different is that they are able to augment their political power—the use of political tactics and channels to advance their interests—with their "operational power," officers' authority to use violence and the discretion over when to use it.

At one point, Schrader notes that police unions have saddled municipalities with huge unfunded pension liabilities and other pernicious perks. Sadly, he thinks the problem is that every other public employee doesn't have the same benefits. "Although all workers should have access to the types of compensations and benefits available to police with powerful unions, the underlying alteration that must occur is to keep this one particular profession from holding primacy in our politics, distorting and dominating the entire sphere."

Still, Blue Power is a detailed and often interesting history of police organizing that rightly recognizes what officers have known for years: Policing is politics.

The post 'Blue Power' and the Rise of Police Union Politics appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Administration Presents Update on its Tariff Refund Plan

2026-04-16T04:48:59Z

After the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's massive International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs in a case I helped litigate along with the Liberty Justice Center and others, litigation continued over tariff refunds owed to the many businesses that paid illegally collected tariffs under IEEPA - a total of some $166 billion. In March, Judge Richard K. Eaton of the US Court of International Trade - the judge assigned to oversee the refund process - ordered the administration to grant refunds to to all those businesses that were forced to pay the tariffs - including those that had not filed lawsuits seeking refunds. This week, on April 14, in response to Judge Eaton's court order, the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) submitted a required update on the status of their refund plan. The Hill has a helpful summary:

Roughly 330,000 importers who paid a combined $166 billion as part of President Trump's emergency tariffs are waiting on refunds after the Supreme Court in February struck down the levies in a blockbuster 6-3 decision.

CBP, the federal agency in charge of collecting tariffs, has warned the immense scale of the refund effort requires time. Officials have been working to launch the first phase of the new system on April 20, though the agency previously suggested importers may need to wait an additional 45 days afterwards to actually receive their funds.

Lord said the system will be able to process electronic refunds for about 82 percent of the affected tariff entries. That accounts for about $127 billion in deposits. More than 56,000 importers have already signed up, and the number continues to grow as the system nears its launch.

Others won't be able to use that automated process. Some entries that haven't gone through a formal close-out step called "liquidation" and are subject to antidumping orders must instead go through a manual, administrative process that requires additional steps, Lord noted.

CBP says that applies to about $2.9 billion worth of tariff deposits that need refunding.

This seems less bad than the worst-case scenario in which the administration could simply stonewall most victims of the illegal tariffs, through some combination of malice and bureaucratic incompetence. It is also significant that the administration has - so far, at least - not tried to appeal Judge Eaton's order. In my earlier post on this subject, I indicated they might at least appeal the universal nature of the order, which could potentially be attacked based on the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling Trump v. CASA, Inc. (though I also indicated that I believe Judge Eaton correctly distinguished CASA).

But, as the Hill article notes, the process may still be time-consuming and difficult for many businesses. That is particularly true for smaller importers that have less bureaucratic capacity than bigger firms. Meanwhile, the longer the process drags on, the more interest payments we taxpayers will be on the hook for, a point Judge Eaton rightly stressed in his March ruling.

And, as I pointed out in my previous post, even the most complete possible tariff refund system will not fully compensate many harms inflicted by the illegal tariffs on both businesses and consumers. Among other things, they cannot compensate businesses for lost sales, disruptions in supplier relationships, lost investments, and more. Consumers, of course, will not be compensated for having to pay higher prices.

For these reasons, as also noted in my earlier post, courts made a mistake when they stayed the Court of International Trade injunction against the tariffs issued when we won our initial trial court victory in May 2025. As I noted at the time:

One factor courts consider in assessing a motion to stay is which side is likely to ultimately prevail on the merits….

Another key factor is which side is likely to suffer "irreparable harm" if they lose on the stay issue. We argue that our clients - and thousands of other businesses - will suffer great irreparable harm if a stay is imposed. They will lose sales due to higher prices, good will can be lost, relationships with suppliers and investors will be disrupted, and more. Those harms can't be made up merely by refunding tariff payments months from now, after the appellate process concludes.

All of the noncompensable harms we warned against came true. And, in addition, the administration has been slow to enact an effective tariff refund system, thereby further exacerbating the harm, and leaving taxpayers on the hook for rapidly growing interest payments.

I hope courts learn from this experience. When and if they strike down Trump's newest massive illegal tariffs - those imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 - they should know not to stay any injunction issued against them. Judges should not blindly accept administration assurances that any harms will be promptly remedied by refunds issued after the fact.

NOTE: As I have previously noted, I am no longer a member of the V.O.S. Selections legal team, because my role ended after the Supreme Court issued its decision. Thus, I am not involved in the refund phase of this litigation.

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In Poisoned Ivies, Stefanik Sees Censorship as a Cure for 'Anti-Americanism'

2026-04-16T13:55:59Z

Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, by Elise Stefanik, Threshold Editions, 256 pages, $29.

Elise Stefanik seems to be stepping away from politics, having suspended her gubernatorial campaign and announced that she will not seek re-election to Congress. The New York Republican's new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, was presumably intended to advance her political career. It may instead serve as a coda to it.

Central to Poisoned Ivies is a congressional hearing held December 5, 2023, when three Ivy league presidents went viral—and not in the good way—for their response to Stefanik's question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university's code of conduct on bullying or harassment?"

Stefanik excoriates the presidents for the "deadpan" and "nearly verbatim" answers they all gave: "It depends on the context." Two presidents, Harvard's Claudine Gay and Penn's Liz Magill, were out of the job soon after the hearing, and Stefanik laments that MIT President Sally Kornbluth managed to escape the fallout with her title intact. Stefanik suggests that the "hearing heard around the world," as she repeatedly calls it, is the zenith of her political accomplishments.

As Stefanik emphasizes throughout the book, this was intended as a simple test of good or evil, one that requires only one word: "Yes." But Stefanik asked these presidents a question about law and policy, then faulted them for not instead answering the unasked moral question about whether they personally condemn pro-genocidal speech. Conservatives have long objected when university bureaucrats blur their personal convictions with their institutional policies to the detriment of neutral speech principles. But here, Stefanik directly demands it.

Despite Stefanik's claims, the context of speech does actually matter. Without more, a comment perceived as "calling for genocide" is indeed unlikely to meet either the Supreme Court's standard for peer-on-peer harassment or the limits of First Amendment protection. Later in the book, Stefanik shows her hand and demonstrates why it's necessary for university leaders to approach such questions with caution: She says the phrase "from the river to the sea" is a "genocidal chant"—presumably one she expects universities to ban.

Readers can draw their own conclusions about the meaning and impact of this and similar phrases. But under the First Amendment, their legal status is not a hard call: This is protected speech. Separating how you feel about speech from your analysis of whether it's protected is a First Amendment fundamental that we should expect elected officials to understand.

Poisoned Ivies does highlight some genuinely disturbing incidents that took place on campus in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. A Cornell student threatened to commit a mass shooting at a kosher dining hall, for example, and there were times when students or workers were trapped inside buildings during occupations. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where I work, noted, it does not violate the First Amendment for universities to protect students against actual threats or physical harm.

But Stefanik does a real disservice to that cause by conflating unlawful conduct, which universities have a responsibility to address, with what she perceives as offensive speech about October 7 and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she expects the universities she herself derides as censorial to censor. There is a difference between what morality may require of us and what limits the law can place upon us. And that chasm exists for good reason: The beauty and promise of living in a free country is our right to pursue our own version of the good without being forced to live by the values embraced by our politicians. One legislator's "moral rot" is another American's core beliefs and values.

Stefanik also keeps pairing antisemitism with the hazy concept of "anti-Americanism." She never bothers to define the second concept, nor does she address the obvious First Amendment questions raised by an elected official's endeavours to crack down on such an amorphous, subjective concept. But those distinctions require context and nuance, which Stefanik treats as impediments to the moral clarity demanded by these threats. At one point, the list even balloons to include a murky "anti-West" hate.

In these repeated dismissals of "anti-Americanism," Stefanik derides student bodies who she suggests reject America, its freedom, and its founding ideals. But what is a greater rejection of the founding ideals of the United States than an overreaching federal government trampling the First Amendment? That overreach is exactly what this book celebrates.

Stefanik calls the Trump administration's funding freezes to universities like Columbia and Harvard a correct use of "the federal government's considerable power." Whether that power is employed lawfully is, once again, a pesky nuance that this book is uninterested in addressing. Nitpicky questions of constitutionality are not welcome distractions in a battle cast in these dire moral terms. Harvard's reaction to the administration's strongarming—a lawsuit defending itself—is, she complains, a "vicious[] attack." She calls President Alan Garber's assertion of the university's constitutional rights a result of "radicalized Trump-deranged faculty."

Stefanik rightly notes the broad challenges posed by academic ties with countries like China and Qatar and the associated risk that foreign governments will instill their censorship preferences onto our universities. There is a serious threat that foreign censorship will diminish our universities in both blunt and subtle ways, and I document how vast the problem is in my book Authoritarians in the Academy. Fears of political retaliation in the form of revoked funding can and have pressured universities to contort themselves to please the governments who are proffering those funds, to the detriment of free expression.

But for a critic so concerned with the threat of censorship levied by foreign governments, Stefanik is curiously eager to see it imposed domestically.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is Stefanik's celebration of this administration's crackdown on international students. This includes the newly instituted requirement that their social media accounts be made public so officials can spot "any indications of hostility" to U.S. institutions. ("Rightly so," she writes.) Poisoned Ivies expresses some valid concerns about some students' inability to express views unpopular with their peers or administrators, but the book valorizes something far, far worse: an inability to express views unpopular with elected officials, with arrest and deportation as punishment. In the land of the free, international students are forced to swallow their criticisms of the very government threatening to deport them for wrongthink.

Universities are "no longer educating international students, as they once did, into core American principles and values," Stefanik complains, "because the universities themselves no longer believe in American principles and values." Unfortunately, some of our elected officials aren't interested in educating international students in American values such as freedom of speech either.

Poisoned Ivies is a book heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. Stefanik diagnoses universities as partisan, censorial institutions, but her plan for reform is more partisanship and more censorship. Whatever reasonable criticisms Stefanik raises about higher education are drowned out by her advocacy not for institutions that do not censor, but for ones that censor more to her liking.

Stefanik never quite explains what she means by "anti-Americanism." But readers searching for a definition can find displays of it littered throughout Poisoned Ivies' pages.

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Another Drug Boat Bombing

2026-04-16T14:06:45Z

More alleged drug boat slayings. The U.S. military announced last night that it had bombed another boat it claims was smuggling drugs into the country.

U.S. Southern Command claimed on social media to have killed three male "narco-terrorists" in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The post includes a video of the "kinetic" strike turning the bombed boat into a fireball.

On April 15, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/EaGDMHmpan

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) April 16, 2026

The New York Times reports that this is the 51st time the Trump administration has used the military to bomb suspected drug boats. The attacks have killed a total of 177 people.

Though it shouldn't be, trafficking drugs is a crime. Criminals are normally arrested by the police, instead of being killed by the military. Trump's use of the military to kill suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean has been legally controversial since the strikes began in September of last year.

The administration has adopted the seemingly contradictory position that it can summarily execute alleged narco-traffickers because they are terrorists engaged in "armed conflict" with the U.S., but that the strikes themselves do not count as "hostilities" that Congress could stop under the War Powers Resolution.

Neither the administration's designation of drug smugglers as armed combatants at war with the U.S. nor its denial that it is engaged in hostilities makes sense on its own.

Standard definitions of armed conflict and armed combatant can't be stretched to cover drug smugglers. Blowing up drug smugglers, on the other hand, would seem to very clearly meet the definition of hostilities.

The Trump administration has tried to say it's not engaged in hostilities that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because the U.S. military personnel blowing up the drug boats are not at risk of being attacked by their targets.

"This argument concedes that the targets posed no immediate threat, meaning Trump authorized the use of lethal force in circumstances where it was morally and legally unjustified," wrote Jacob Sullum in a recent issue of Reason.

Lawmakers have put forward multiple resolutions to stop the Trump administration from continuing with boat strikes, but all have failed thus far.

As it stands, the president continues to exercise the effectively unchecked power to kill people he alone decides need killing.

Blockade broadens. Meanwhile, in our other noncongressionally sanctioned conflict, the U.S. military has broadened the scope of Iranian shipping that's subject to its blockade.

That blockade that began on Monday initially targeted ports and oil terminals along the Iranian coast. Lloyd's List reports this morning that U.S. Central Command has issued updated guidance asserting a right to board and seize Iran-linked vessels anywhere on the open seas.

The expanded geographic scope of the blockade, when combined with the U.S. military's wide definition of contraband subject to the blockade, means "almost any industrial cargo bound for Iran could plausibly be intercepted," the publication notes.

As The Wall Street Journal detailed in a story yesterday, there's a cat-and-mouse game being played in waters near Iran between the U.S. military and "shadow fleet" ships that have long used various means of deception (like spoofed locations and turned-off transponders) to smuggle sanctioned Iranian oil.

U.S. Central Command claims no Iranian-linked ships have managed to slip its blockade within the first 48 hours. The Journal reports that at least 10 ships, some of which show signs of shadow fleet activity, have managed to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

More money, more problems. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Unified School District reached an agreement with three employee unions to avoid a strike by raising salaries for teachers and other staff.

Despite shrinking enrollment, Los Angeles' per-pupil spending has continued to increase at a much higher rate than overall inflation.

Bizarre situation brewing in LA public schools, as reported by WSJ today

Teachers and parents say schools regularly run out of cleaning supplies and toilet paper

But per-student spending rose from $11.7k to $29.3k since 2014 — about 5x the rate of inflation

Notably…. the…

— Rachel Premack (@rrpre) April 15, 2026

As The Los Angeles Times reports, the district will likely have to dip into its already depleting reserves to pay for the pay increases that the unions extracted. Absent aid from the state, district officials are at an apparent loss as to how to pay for the employee raises.

It's quite possible that L.A. teachers and school staff do deserve a raise. It's hard to say one way or another when the government is the one setting the price of labor.

But a school district going broke while it spends more and more money educating fewer and fewer students is not something taxpayers, parents, or students should have to accept.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: On X, the account Echoes of War shared an early–20th century image of the National Mall and surrounding areas, as seen from the top of the Washington Monument.

The Victorian landscaping and architecture of the Mall looking east from the top of the Washington Monument, showing the influence of the Downing Plan and Adolph Cluss on the National Mall c. 1904. pic.twitter.com/0hVfeiADlw

— Echoes of War (@EchoesofWarYT) April 14, 2026

That generated some complaints about today's comparatively treeless mall.

Nobody in DC in the summer is glad there's a wide treeless mall instead of this shady park. https://t.co/02MYzyNbX5

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) April 15, 2026

can they put trees on the national mall again, it's unbearable to go on for half of the year https://t.co/R1vT38aXyT

— meowtown (@hieywieyneue) April 15, 2026

All things considered, I think today's mall functions pretty well as a summertime park. The walking paths themselves are all tree-lined. Today's open spaces allow people to use the mall for sports, kite flying, and other fun activities that would be difficult to pull off in an urban forest.

The real upgrade that the mall needs is a few more permanent bathrooms and water fountains that actually work.

QUICK HITS

A woman who was arrested for wearing a penis costume to a No Kings protest in Alabama has been found not guilty on all charges.
Tom Palmer at Reason says good riddance to Viktor Orbán.
Also read Scott Alexander on how Orbán was still bad, even if he wasn't a full-on dictator.
Make World Cup attendees pay for their bus trips.
In the wake of Eric Swalwell's exit from the California governor's race, Tom Steyer surges.

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"Cabotage": It's Not "Sabotage" with the "S" Switched to Russian

2026-04-16T13:35:47Z

Just learned this largely legalese word today; it means, according to Black's Law Dictionary,

1. The carrying on of trade along a country's coast; the transport of goods or passengers from one port or place to another in the same country….

2. The privilege of carrying traffic between two ports in the same country.

3. The right of a foreign airline to carry passengers and cargo between airports in the same country.

Black's also offers this quote:

"Some writers maintain [that cabotage] should be applied only to maritime navigation; in this context one can distinguish between petit cabotage — transport between ports situated on the same sea (e.g. Bordeaux-Le Havre) — and grand cabotage — transport between ports situated on different seas (e.g. Bordeaux-Marseille). However, the term is also properly applied to transport between two inland points on an international river within one State, although the term grand cabotage is sometimes incorrectly applied to transnational transport between the inland ports of different riparian States on the same waterway. River cabotage properly so called is sometimes also referred to as local transport. Finally, the term has also been adopted to describe commercial air transport between airports situated in the same State." Robert C. Lane, "Cabotage," in 1 Encyclopedia of Public International Law 519–20 (1992).

Pedantic disclaimer: Yes, I know that the post title should probably technically have said "Cyrillic" and not just "Russian," but I thought "Russian" would be clearer to many readers.

The post "Cabotage": It's Not "Sabotage" with the "S" Switched to Russian appeared first on Reason.com.

"Can Speech Policy Protect Public Health?" in Print in Utah Law Review

2026-04-16T12:29:27Z

My coauthors Cassandra Robertson, Zoe Robinson, and I just published an article entitled "Can Speech Policy Protect Public Health?" in the Utah Law Review. Here is the abstract:

Government speech shapes public health outcomes, yet political incentives often lead officials to either remain silent about emerging threats or subordinate scientific evidence to partisan goals. This Article examines how three factors interact to influence public health: the constitutional status of health-related speech, the political economy of public health policymaking, and the modern information environment. Drawing on insights from public choice theory, we demonstrate how misaligned incentives lead political actors to avoid communicating about health risks or spread misinformation that serves their short-term interests at the expense of population health. The conventional tools of public health policy were developed when official sources could effectively shape public understanding, but today's fragmented information landscape demands new approaches to health communication.

This Article analyzes both the constitutional framework governing health-related speech and the practical dynamics that complicate effective public health messaging. We propose specific mechanisms to combat harmful misinformation while creating stronger incentives for accurate government communication about health threats. Throughout, we move beyond binary debates about censorship versus free speech to develop approaches that reflect the complex relationship between information flows, political incentives, and public health outcomes. The history of public health challenges—from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to today's emerging strains of avian influenza—shows how institutional responses often falter. Understanding these dynamics can help shape better responses to current and future health crises.

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$5K Sanctions for "Egregious, Repeated, and Ongoing" AI Hallucinations in Self-Represented Litigant's Filings

2026-04-15T17:58:41Z

From last week's decision by Judge Virginia Kendall (N.D. Ill.) in Obi v. Cook County:

The Court strikes Plaintiff's motion [to alter or amend the judgment dismissing her complaint] for violating Local Rule 7.1 and sanctions her $5,000 for violating Rule 11.

Plaintiff's motion is 10.5 pages single-spaced and her core argument runs six straight pages in a single paragraph. 10.5 single-spaced pages is 21 pages double-spaced. Plaintiff's reply briefs are 23 pages single-spaced (46 pages double-spaced) and 13 pages single-spaced (26 pages double-spaced). Plaintiff never sought leave to file such voluminous papers. The lack of table of contents is also problematic because, as discussed below, many of Plaintiff's citations are fictious. Plaintiff violated Local Rule 7.1. "Neither a motion nor brief in support … shall exceed 15 pages without prior approval of the court." Any brief that exceeds 15 pages "must have a table of contents with the pages noted and a table of cases." "Any brief … that does not comply with this rule shall be … subject to being stricken by the court." The Court "strictly enforce[s]" this rule. The Court therefore strikes Plaintiff's motion and replies.

Normally the Court, recognizing Plaintiff's pro se status, would offer leeway and consider Plaintiff's briefs despite violating Local Rule 7.1. Plaintiff's egregious, repeated, and ongoing Rule 11 violations, however, foreclose any such possibility. Plaintiff generated each brief using AI. Plaintiff's motion is riddled with AI hallucinations, made up cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact. [Citing filing] (identifying 13 hallucinated cases, quotes, and statements of law)….

This is not the first time Plaintiff has done this. In a prior filing, Plaintiff's brief contained at least 17 instances of fake cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact from AI hallucinations. The Court then gave Plaintiff grace—Plaintiff has exhausted that leniency. Plaintiff's replies suffer from similar Rule 11 violations….

The severity of Plaintiff's Rule 11 ongoing and repeated violations warrants sanctions. "Pro se status does not shelter plaintiffs from sanctions pursuant to Rule 11." "When a self-represented party files a document in federal court, that party is certifying to the court that the legal contentions contained in it 'are warranted by existing law.'" "'Carelessness, good faith, or ignorance are not an excuse for submitting materials that do not comply with Rule 11.'" Plaintiff "must ensure that the case citations and representations she presents to the court are accurate and are supported by valid precedent; the fact that she is representing herself does not relieve her of that duty."

"Filing a document that contains citations to nonexistent cases, quotes language that comes from no real case, or that contains arguments wholly unsupported by the record violates Rule 11." Plaintiff did just that repeatedly. "This demonstrates that [Plaintiff] failed to make a reasonable inquiry into the supporting law or facts. This wastes both the parties' and the Court's time attempting to locate nonexistent cases and unpack made up factual assertions." The Court sanctions Plaintiff $5,000 for filing false cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact to the Court in violation of Rule 11.

The post $5K Sanctions for "Egregious, Repeated, and Ongoing" AI Hallucinations in Self-Represented Litigant's Filings appeared first on Reason.com.

When the U.S. Censored a Movie About the American Revolution and Imprisoned Its Producer

2026-04-15T18:51:40Z

What if I told you that the U.S. government once imprisoned a filmmaker for making a movie about the American Revolution because it depicted British troops in an unflattering light?

In today's edition of the Injustice System newsletter, let's talk about censorship, freedom of speech, and the infuriating—if aptly named—1917 case of United States v. "The Spirit of '76."

When President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. to war against Germany in 1917, he also vowed to crush all enemies that arose closer to home. "There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit," Wilson declared, "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life….[T]he hand of our power should close over them at once."

Congress responded to this call for domestic repression by passing the Espionage Act, which made it illegal to "cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States." In effect, the Espionage Act made it mostly illegal to speak out against American involvement in World War I.

Perhaps the most famous victim of this notorious law was the socialist politician and labor union leader Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for the "crime" of giving an anti-war speech to an audience at an afternoon picnic. In Debs v. United States (1919), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction. "One purpose of [Debs'] speech, whether incidental or not does not matter, was to oppose not only war in general but this war," stated the majority opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. "The opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting."

The ruling in Debs echoed Holmes' earlier decision in Schenck v. United States (1919), which upheld the Espionage Act conviction of a socialist who had been arrested for distributing anti-war pamphlets. "When a nation is at war," Holmes declared, "many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured."

Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was also targeted by federal prosecutors at this time under the Espionage Act. But his saga is not as famous in free speech lore as it should be, probably because his case never made it to the Supreme Court.

Goldstein's "crime" was producing a silent film about the American Revolution titled The Spirit of '76. Among other things, the film reportedly contained scenes that depicted British troops bayoneting women and children. Because Britain was then an ally of America's in the First World War, the U.S. government quickly suppressed the film and prosecuted Goldstein for interfering with the war effort. "History is history, and fact is fact," conceded the trial judge. But "this is no time" for "those things that may have the tendency…of creating animosity or want of confidence between us and our allies." Goldstein was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two years later, his conviction was upheld on appeal.

Tragically, it seems that Goldstein never recovered from this persecution by the U.S. government. According to Michael Innam of the New York Public Library's Rare Book Division, "upon his release [from prison], Goldstein moved to Europe and attempted without success to reestablish his film career. After being expelled from Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s, he returned to the United States where, so far as is known, he died in obscurity." As for the "offending" motion picture itself, Inman noted that The Spirit of '76, "like a great many films of the silent era…is now considered lost, with no print known to survive."

Is there a lesson to be learned from this terrible story of injustice? Perhaps this: Sometimes all three branches of the U.S. government come together for the purpose of trampling upon the Constitution. Be alert.

The post When the U.S. Censored a Movie About the American Revolution and Imprisoned Its Producer appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: April 16, 1962

2025-07-10T04:59:31Z

4/16/1962: Justice Byron White takes oath.

Justice Byron White

The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 16, 1962 appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's 'Great Healthcare Plan' To Replace Obamacare Isn't Much of a Plan

2026-03-24T19:56:22Z

For the better part of a decade, Republicans ran on a single mantra when it came to health care: repeal and replace Obamacare. When the slogan was conceived, it made political and strategic sense.

But Republicans never had a plan for what to replace it with. Multiple proposals at various levels of completion circulated, but there was never any agreement about even the broad outlines of a GOP health care plan, much less the myriad complicated specifics.

When pressed, Republicans often defaulted to vague, poll-tested language to describe their ideas, such as "personalized" and "patient centered"—or, in the case of President Donald Trump, "great" and "terrific." In debates leading up to the 2016 election, Trump stumbled over phrases like "lines around the states," likely a reference to allowing interstate purchase of insurance, and praised European socialized medicine. When asked about his health care policy ideas during his 2024 campaign, he claimed to have "concepts of a plan."

In January 2026, Trump finally delivered something he dubbed "The Great Healthcare Plan." Whether it's great might be a matter of debate. But it is in no way, shape, or form an actual plan.

Trump's health care proposal consists of a single page laying out four big goals: "lower drug prices," "lower insurance premiums," "hold big insurance companies accountable," and "maximize price transparency." Each item gets a few brief bullet points' worth of explanation.

And that's it.

These are not inherently problematic goals: Cost reduction is always welcome, health care is indeed beset by opaque pricing, and while big corporations aren't the biggest problem with American health care, accountability is generally a good thing.

But these slogans give no clue as to how Trump actually thinks the system should work. The closest thing to a major proposal in the document comes in the accountability section: "Send the money directly to the American people."

"The money" that this is presumably referring to is the roughly $35 billion a year that, since 2021, had been spent on topping up Obamacare's subsidies for private individual insurance. Actually doing so would require legislation, which doesn't exist, and policy details, like how to allocate those funds, which also don't exist. Spending that money on direct transfers would mean persisting with tens of billions in unnecessary health care spending on top of the existing system.

But even this level of analysis treats Trump's pseudo-proposal too seriously. The rollout of the Great Healthcare Plan was attended by little more than a brief Oval Office speech and a handful of online posts. It generated little notice, even among Republicans in Congress, who barely seemed to register that it existed. Trump briefly mentioned the plan in his State of the Union, but there was certainly nothing like a floor debate or a push for a vote—because, well, there wasn't anything to vote for or against.

That's because legislation, much less a debate about the details that legislation would entail, wasn't the point. The point was to have a piece of paper that Republicans can point to when asked about health care policy. Trump has a plan, they can now say, and it's great. It says so right in the name!

The fact remains that American health care needs serious surgery. Decades of subsidies, spending, and tax system distortions have rendered it a confusing, frustrating, bloated, and—for taxpayers as well as individuals—increasingly unaffordable mess. Health care spending is the biggest single driver of long-term debt and deficits, and one of Medicare's main funds (itself a sort of accounting fiction) is set to become insolvent in under a decade. But since Trump was first elected, Republicans have explicitly promised not to touch Medicare.

Quality, substantive policy ideas do, in fact, exist; Cato Institute Health Policy Studies Director Michael Cannon has long touted a system of very large health savings accounts that would radically shift not only how health care is financed but how health care decisions are made. Republicans don't want to master the wonky details, and they don't want to be seen as disrupting the status quo, unsustainable as it is.

That's how, more than a decade and a half after the passage of Obamacare, Republicans ended up with Trump's Great Healthcare Plan, a proposal so empty it makes nothingburgers look like they have the calorie count of the entire dessert menu at a Cheesecake Factory. There's no there there. But rest assured—it's probably "patient centered" and "terrific."

The post Trump's 'Great Healthcare Plan' To Replace Obamacare Isn't Much of a Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is

2026-04-14T03:06:56Z

San Diego voters will decide in June whether to approve a tax on empty homes. The $8,000 tax would affect homes that are unoccupied more than 182 days a year. The tax is projected to cover 5,000 homes and expected to bring in as much as $24 million in revenue, which city officials say they will spend on affordable housing projects.

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Open Thread

2026-04-16T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Says He's Willing To 'Risk' Your Rights for His Surveillance Powers

2026-04-16T21:40:25Z

As he was running for another term in the White House in 2024, President Donald Trump made it clear that he was not a fan of the government's electronic spying powers contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

"KILL FISA," he wrote in an all-caps message on Truth Social. "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS."

It's been two years and five days since Trump wrote that, but it might as well have been another lifetime. On Wednesday, Trump again took to Truth Social as Congress was debating a possible extension to Section 702 of FISA, which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas.

Now, Trump says he's willing to "risk" the rights of Americans in order to keep those spying powers intact.

"I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!" he wrote. "We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!"

The context here is the April 20 deadline for reauthorizing Section 702. As Reason's Joe Lancaster detailed a few weeks ago, that deadline provides opportunities for members of Congress to demand changes to how FISA works.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), for example, tried to offer amendments that would, among other things, require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before trolling through communication records that end up in the FISA database. On the other side of the aisle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has vowed to vote against a "clean" reauthorization.

But Trump no longer wants to "KILL FISA." In fact, he doesn't even want to see any basic reforms that might better protect Americans from unlawful surveillance.

That happens a lot, as I've written before. In 2021, for example, the FBI used its FISA powers to run more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database. A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report unsealed in 2023 showed that the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021—targeting "crime victims, January 6th riot suspects, people arrested at a protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020," and donors to congressional candidates.

The 2024 reauthorization implemented some reforms that limit how broadly the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can use the records in the FISA database. Despite that, The New York Times reported this month that federal law enforcement agencies have been using a new "filtering" process to search records without properly logging those queries.

That's proof that more guardrails are needed, civil liberties groups say.

"This warrantless surveillance system is broken, and extending it absent reforms would be an abdication of the fundamental responsibility to protect Americans' privacy," Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement to Reason. "The answer for fixing the problems and endless abuse of queries is simple: If you want to query an American's private messages, get a warrant. It's time Congress enacted a warrant rule and closed this backdoor search loophole."

It sure would be nice if Trump, who was once a prominent target of these surveillance powers, were willing to advocate for changes. Alas, now that those powers are ones he gets to wield, there is no need for consistency or principles.

The post Trump Says He's Willing To 'Risk' Your Rights for His Surveillance Powers appeared first on Reason.com.

Sen. Mike Lee Says Federal Prison Hung Up on Him When He Tried To Check on Inmate

2026-04-16T02:13:02Z

Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) wrote in a social media post Wednesday that an employee at a federal prison hung up on him when he called to check on the health of an incarcerated man.

Lee's experience is a particularly pointed example of an issue that families and criminal justice advocacy groups have complained about for years: It's next to impossible to get information about inmates' health from the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and the agency frequently fails to notify families when their incarcerated loved ones are sick or even dying.

This cruelty led lawmakers in Congress to introduce legislation last year that would have required the Justice Department to issue guidance to the BOP for promptly notifying families in such cases.

Lee wrote in the post that he called the prison on behalf of a constituent whose son was incarcerated. The constituent was worried because they hadn't heard from their son in several days, and he suffered from "multiple, potentially life-threatening health conditions that are going untreated in prison," Lee wrote.

Medical neglect in state and federal prisons is widespread, despite the Eighth Amendment guaranteeing prisoners access to basic health care.

But when Lee called the prison's main switchboard, he said a BOP employee scolded him for calling "too fucking late," and refused to provide any information, beyond claiming that the inmate was alive and receiving appropriate medical care. When Lee persisted in asking for the employee's name, Lee said the staffer hung up.

"Sadly, this is not the first time I've had this experience when talking to people from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on behalf of constituents with an incarcerated family member suffering from a severe medical condition," Lee wrote. "And each occasion, I've been treated at best with dismissiveness and at worst with contempt and profanity."

I got a call tonight from a constituent whose son is in federal prison

He explained that he hasn't heard from his son in several days (which is unusual for him), that his son suffers from multiple, potentially life-threatening health conditions that are going untreated in…

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 15, 2026

A BOP spokesperson said in a statement to Reason that "the way the Senator was spoken to is inconsistent with the level of professionalism expected of our staff at BOP."

"This matter involving Senator Lee is regrettable and unacceptable," the spokesperson said. "It was immediately addressed at the highest levels. Senior leadership has already reached out to the Senator and his office staff. Appropriate corrective action will be taken without delay."

The spokesperson also said that the call monitoring and other measures are underway to improve in-person interactions, including authorizing wardens to replace staff in public-facing posts who fail to act professionally.

In interviews with Reason in 2024, family members described delays in being notified that their incarcerated loved one had been hospitalized, or even died; having their phone calls ignored; not being allowed to see their loved one in their final moments; delays in being sent the body and death certificate; being given inaccurate or incomplete information about the manner of death; or waiting months and years for the BOP to fulfill their public records requests for more information about how their loved one died.

For example, Kesha Jackson's husband, John Jackson, died at a low-security federal prison in Arkansas in 2019. On that day, Kesha Jackson received a call from John's sister, who said she needed to call the prison right away; something had happened and staff wouldn't tell the sister anything.

"I did not get through," Jackson said in a video produced by FAMM. "The phone just rang and rang."

"John's other cellmate, who had gone home, called and said, 'Kesh, look at the federal inmate locator,'" Jackson recalled, "and they had updated it to say 'deceased.'" A chaplain would call her several hours later to break the news she'd already learned.

In 2020, the daughters of a woman who died at a federal women's prison in Alabama told Reason they had been calling for weeks to try and get help for their mother's deteriorating health, but the prison staffers "were hanging up in our faces."

"They laughed at her," one of the daughters said. "They said she was faking. They told us she was too young to be having a heart attack."

The father of one incarcerated woman told Reason that the BOP never informed him that his daughter had been in a coma for more than a week.

"We were emailing every day, and all of a sudden the emails stopped," the father wrote. "I didn't know what was going on for about a week. Ten days later I got a letter from one of the people she was incarcerated with that told me what happened."

Sens. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.) and John Kennedy (R–La.) introduced legislation last year—the Family Notification of Death, Injury, or Illness in Custody Act—that would require the Justice Department to issue guidance to the BOP for promptly notifying families of individuals in custody who become seriously ill, suffer life-threatening injuries, or die.

"Too often, the families of those incarcerated never find out about a serious illness, a life-threatening injury, or even the death of a loved one behind bars," Ossoff said in a press release.

However, the bill failed to advance.

The post Sen. Mike Lee Says Federal Prison Hung Up on Him When He Tried To Check on Inmate appeared first on Reason.com.

ICE Is Determined To Unmask a Reddit User Whose Only Crime Seems To Be Criticizing ICE

2026-04-15T20:18:53Z

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to unmask an anonymous Reddit user whose only crime seems to be criticizing the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS, withdrew an administrative subpoena demanding information about the Reddit account "Tired_Thumb" after facing a legal challenge in the Northern District of California, where Reddit is headquartered. But as The Intercept reported last week, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., now seem intent on obtaining information about the ICE critic from Reddit via a grand jury subpoena.

"Government critics are not suspects and free speech is not a crime," says Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). "The First Amendment protects our right to criticize the government anonymously—an American tradition that dates back to the founding. So far, the government hasn't been able to point to a single Reddit post [by Tired_Thumb] that's not protected by the First Amendment. Not one. By putting the administration's feelings above the First Amendment, government agents are sending a deliberate message to each of us: Don't criticize us—or else."

On March 6, Reddit notified the user associated with Tired_Thumb, identified as "J. Doe" in court documents, that it had received a "legal request" for information about the account, including Doe's name, address, phone number, length of service, and I.P. addresses. Doe, who lives in Oregon, sought help from the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), which is based in Eugene, in challenging what an ICE agent described as a summons issued under 19 USC 1509, which deals with customs enforcement.

As CLDC attorney Matthew Kellebrew noted in a March 12 motion to quash the summons, that supposed authority is inapplicable in this case. "The statute stops far short of conferring generalized authority to obtain records of any kind beyond the scope of those related to merchandise duties, taxes, or fees," Kellebrew wrote. "Here, there is no plausible nexus between the documents sought and those permissible by statute. J. Doe is a U.S. citizen who has not traveled outside the country, is not engaged in any international commerce, has no business concerns outside the United States, and primarily uses their Reddit account to engage in political speech relevant to their local community."

The ICE agent who signed the summons nevertheless claimed Section 1509 provides general authority to demand records relevant to the enforcement of any "laws and regulations administered by" ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A November 2017 report from the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) rejected that interpretation of the law, noting that Title 19 "addresses ascertainment, collection, and recovery of customs duties."

The OIG report was prompted by CBP's invocation of Section 1509 to justify a March 2017 summons aimed at unmasking an anonymous Twitter user. CBP withdrew that summons after Twitter challenged it, arguing that it exceeded the agency's legal authority and impinged on the user's First Amendment rights. Following that incident, CBP reminded investigators that "the issuance of a 1509 summons requires probable cause to believe that the records relate to an importation of merchandise that is prohibited." But the OIG found that "lack of clear guidance on the proper use of Section 1509 Summonses has resulted in inconsistent—and, in some cases, improper—use of such summonses."

Evidently that problem persists. But if Doe was not suspected of a customs violation, what exactly was ICE investigating? When Doe's attorneys "reviewed their Reddit posts," The Intercept notes, "they found nothing to suggest criminal activity or intent."

The posts included criticism of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Minneapolis protester Renee Good on January 7. According to The Intercept, Doe noted that "Ross had lived in Chaska, Minnesota; grew up in Indiana; and served in the Indiana National Guard—biographical details that were circulating widely at the time." Doe added, "Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary."

In another post, Doe responded to a Reddit user who sought suggestions of slogans for anti-ICE protest signs. Doe suggested "Urine speaks louder than words"—the title of a song by the folk punk band Wingnut Dishwashers Union. Doe also had remarked that "TSA sucks and we all know it." According to Doe's lawyers, The Intercept says, "these were the most aggressive posts they could find."

ICE, in other words, not only relied on imaginary legal authority for its summons; it seemed intent on investigating someone for constitutionally protected speech. The summons "seeks to unmask an anonymous speaker engaging in political speech on the internet," Kellebrew noted in his motion. "The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently protected the right of individuals and groups to engage in anonymous political speech."

Under the relevant case law, "the government must prove a compelling interest in such identification," Kellebrew wrote. "Because the government has failed to do so, an order compelling the production of identities would grossly infringe on the First Amendment rights of Doe."

A couple of weeks after Kellebrew filed that motion, ICE withdrew the summons. But now the action has moved across the country to Washington, D.C., where Reddit has been summoned to appear before a grand jury. The government has a decided advantage in that forum, since the grand jurors will hear only one side of the case.

Since the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term, The Intercept notes, "federal agents have increasingly demanded [that] social media companies reveal the users behind anonymous accounts critical of his immigration crackdown." Although they are especially interested in posts that "identify employees of the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE or share real-time information on enforcement activity," they "have also targeted social media users seemingly doing nothing more than expressing anger at the government."

In the latter sort of cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found, the government tends to withdraw its demands when they are challenged. "We should be very, very, very concerned that they've now taken one of these to a grand jury," EFF senior counsel David Greene told The Intercept. "It's something to be taken very seriously."

During the first half of 2025, Reddit reports, it received 1,179 requests for account information from law enforcement agencies, "the highest volume of information requests that Reddit has received in a single reporting period." Two-thirds of the requests came from U.S. agencies, and in those cases Reddit supplied the information 82 percent of the time.

"Reddit carefully reviews each request for compliance with applicable laws," the platform says. "If we determine that a request is not legally valid (e.g., missing legal requirements; seeking information outside the scope of the issued legal process), Reddit will challenge or reject it. If we consider the request to be overbroad or unclear, we will ask the requesting entity to modify or refine the request."

Reddit says it "attempts to notify our users when their account data is subject to legal information requests before any disclosures are made" unless "we are legally prohibited from doing so, or under certain other counterproductive circumstances (e.g., exigent emergency situations, child safety matters)." But if users cannot afford an attorney or find one who will work pro bono, they are unlikely to successfully challenge such "requests." In Doe's case, according to Kellebrew's motion, Reddit said it "intended to comply unless Doe provided Reddit with a motion to quash."

It is "categorically FALSE" that the DHS is targeting Doe based on speech protected by the First Amendment, a department spokesperson told Military.com this week. "Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles and rapists. They are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them." According to the DHS, Military.com says, the effort to identify Doe is "part of an investigation into threats and doxxing of ICE law enforcement officers."

Judging from the posts reviewed by the CLDC, however, nothing Doe said on Reddit would qualify as a "true threat," a First Amendment exception that the Supreme Court defines as a "serious expression" indicating that "a speaker means to 'commit an act of unlawful violence.'" In some cases, "you could argue that something akin to a threat had been posted online," CLDC litigation director Lauren Regan told Military.com. "But when we went through the entire content of our client's Reddit posts, there was nothing. This was very innocuous."

Nor would any of the posts qualify as doxing, in the sense of revealing previously private information about someone with malicious intent. But the DHS has a history of defining such terms broadly enough to encompass constitutionally protected conduct.

"Violence is anything that threatens [ICE agents] and their safety," Kristi Noem, then the DHS secretary, told reporters last July, "so it is doxing them, it's videotaping them where they're at when they're out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles."

A couple of months later, Tricia McLaughlin, then the assistant DHS secretary for public affairs, likewise described "videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online" as a form of "doxing." She added that "we will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law." In January, McLaughlin told Wired that "videoing our officers in an effort to dox them and reveal their identities" is "a federal crime and a felony."

According to the DHS, it seems, armed government agents have a right to conceal their identities, but critics of those agents have no such right. As FIRE's Creeley notes, that is not how the First Amendment works.

The post ICE Is Determined To Unmask a Reddit User Whose Only Crime Seems To Be Criticizing ICE appeared first on Reason.com.

Hungary Breaks Free: How Voters Ended 16 Years of Orbán's Iron Rule

2026-04-16T11:32:31Z

Sunday night in Budapest was glorious. The overwhelming majority of Hungarians in the country's biggest-ever election chucked out a corrupt and oppressive regime that had transformed a once-thriving post-communist country into a listening post for Moscow and Beijing.

I flew in Sunday morning hoping to witness the second great Hungarian liberation of my lifetime. Back in the late 1980s, I had been active in Hungary and other Central/Eastern European countries, working with the classical liberal Carl Menger Institute out of nearby Vienna to identify and assist people looking to escape what turned out to be the final days of Soviet-bloc tyranny.

Through that work I got to know many founders of Fidesz, then known as the Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, or the Federation of Democratic Youth (the acronym Fidesz is Latin for trust). We organized projects with the college where Fidesz was born, the Rajk László Szakkollégium, from intensive seminars on translations of F. A. Hayek's works to summer schools.

But what had started out as an exciting youth movement for freedom was converted into a nationalist and illiberal political party, eventually degenerating into a corrupt and statist tool for the personal enrichment of its leaders, particularly Viktor Orbán.

Orbán, who exploded on the scene in June 1989 with a speech in Budapest's Heroes' Square demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops, became Fidesz president in 1993, intentionally shucking off the party's cosmopolitan past in favor of a more populist nationalism. He forged an alliance with the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and the Independent Smallholders' Party (FKGP), but then, after becoming prime minister for the first time in 1998, aggressively poached the voting bases of his two coalition partners, annihilating them as political forces. No alternating center-left/center-right coalitions for Orbán; he wanted Fidesz to have it all.

Orbán lost to the Socialists in 2002, but four years later, Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány doomed his party by letting slip at a leaked closed-door party event that, "We have obviously been lying throughout the last one and a half to two years." The leak eventually led not only to a victory for Fidesz in 2010, but—disastrously—a two-thirds majority in Parliament. This "constitutional majority" allowed Orbán to rewrite laws, overhaul the management and ownership of institutions, and write a new constitution.

Over the ensuing 16 years, Hungary was transformed into an illiberal crony state, falling further and further behind other post-communist entrants into the European Union. Upon accession into the European Union in 2004, Poland was much poorer than its southern neighbor, as the Hungarian Communists had tolerated a much greater degree of private enterprise during the "goulash communism" of the 1980s. Poland has since pulled well ahead of Hungary, while Romania, which had been far, far poorer than Hungary, has caught up.

Tom Palmer

The chart represents gross domestic product (GDP) per capita expressed in Purchasing Power Standards, with the E.U. average set at 100 percent. The percentages represent what the average citizen of a country could buy with his or her income as a percentage of the average for the European Union as a whole.

Major drivers in Hungary's dismal performance have been a collapse in private investment, due to cronyism replacing rule of law, as well as the departure of hundreds of thousands of prime-aged Hungarians who prefer setting up businesses, finding work, and managing their affairs without worrying about where they stand with the ruling party.

Orbán made life worse for his constituents by building what he advertised as "an illiberal state," in which "no policy-specific debates are needed now." Since 2015 he has ruled by decree under "permanent emergency" powers. He has for years actively courted the political and economic support of Russia and China. Chinese Communist Party activists patrol the streets of Budapest and in 2024 even forcibly stopped Hungarian opposition party member Márton Tompos as he was hoisting a European Union flag in advance of a Xi Jinping visit.

Orbán actually defended Chinese police for violently preventing Hungarians from holding free-Tibet signs on the streets of Budapest, saying, "Those who come here as our guests are entitled to be treated as such. So these two rights need to be aligned, so we do not permit activities and events that would diminish our guests' visit who come to Hungary and are received with respect." Xi Jinping praised Orbán's government for its "unequivocal and firm support for China on issues related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and human rights." For that, Orbán was richly rewarded with contracts, state investments, and other gifts.

The relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has been particularly blatant. Orbán declared in February of this year that Ukraine, which Putin continues to mercilessly attack, is an enemy of Hungary. The Orbán regime reportedly even went so far as to prepare false flag operations to blame Ukrainians for election-related violence, including, just days prior, the alleged "discovery" of explosive-laden backpacks near a pipeline in neighboring Serbia.

Moreover, Orbán and his foreign minister Péter Szijjártó have repeatedly displayed slavish subservience to Putin and his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, with the former saying to Putin on October 17, 2025, that "In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service," comparing himself to a mouse offering services to a lion." Szijjártó, meanwhile, was caught serially calling Lavrov immediately after stepping out of E.U. meetings, and agreeing to provide secret E.U. documents: "I immediately do it. I send it to my embassy in Moscow, and my ambassador will forward it to your chief of staff, and then it's at your disposal."

The broadcast and print media are almost completely in the hands of the government or Orbán cronies, thanks to abuse of tax and regulatory powers, denial of licenses, state loans, and the awarding of government advertising contracts on the basis of party allegiance. The voting system had been thoroughly gerrymandered and rigged to favor Fidesz. Subsidies flowed to Fidesz voters, with clear statements from Orbán that they owed him for the support. For the opposition and its supporters, life was made much harder.

So how did Orbán lose?

First, despite the rigged system, the intimidation, the gifts, and all of his other tricks, Orbán was widely despised by Hungarians, especially among young people who have known only his corrupt rule and nothing else. The dismal economic performance meant that Hungarians could see that they were falling behind and knew who was responsible for it.

Second, the opposition leader Péter Magyar, a former member of Fidesz, was a tireless campaigner who walked through the whole of Hungary, visiting villages and speaking directly with ordinary Hungarians. His campaign was expertly run at every level.

Third, the public was prepared for any dirty tricks that Orbán might prepare. Former MP and opposition figure Zoltán Kész sounded the alarm in The Telegraph on March 1: "Hungarians want to kick Viktor Orban out of power. Is he planning a coup to stop them?" Thus ensued a series of revelations about Orbán's dirty deals and inept attempts at false flag operations.

Fourth, revelations about Orbán's craven subservience to Xi and Putin undermined his campaign claim that he was protecting Hungarian sovereignty from the European Union (of which Hungary is a member). The dissonance reached absurd levels when U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance beclowned himself by going on a U.S.-taxpayer-funded trip to Hungary to campaign explicitly for Orbán. There Vance stated, with no evidence of understanding the irony, "What has happened in this country, what has happened in the midst of this election campaign is one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I've ever seen or ever even read about."

Trump added his surreal two cents, writing in his uniquely eloquent style, "Hungary: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBÁN. He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary — VIKTOR ORBÁN WILL NEVER LET THE GREAT PEOPLE OF HUNGARY DOWN. I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!," followed the next day by "My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary's Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán's continued Leadership!"

In the end, Hungarians stood up and said Szabad Magyarország!, "Free Hungary!" Thousands of young people chanted Ruszkik Haza!, "Russians, go home!", a phrase first used in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, now shouted as a rejection of Putinism and subordination of Hungary to a Muscovite dictatorship. I'm happy beyond the power of words that I was there to witness it. Now begins the process of fulfilling the slogan. Fortunately, many Hungarians are up for the challenge. Freedom advocates in the rest of Europe and the world should stand ready to assist them.

The post Hungary Breaks Free: How Voters Ended 16 Years of Orbán's Iron Rule appeared first on Reason.com.

Depends on What the Meaning of "Miss" Is: The Miss America Gender Identity Controversy

2026-04-15T18:54:37Z

To advance in competition, Miss North Florida 2025, Kayleigh Bush, was told to sign a contract that forced her to compete against men. She refused.

"Miss" America and "Miss" Florida advertise as women-only competitions, which is misleading and may violate FL law. This is wrong! pic.twitter.com/UJoAzyUOl1

— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) April 10, 2026

The Florida AG sent a letter to the Miss America organization objecting to its policies that appeared to allow contestants who had "fully completed sex reassignment surgery via vaginoplasty (from male to female) with supporting medical documentation and records." (The Miss America organization claims this was intended all along to cover only women born with XX chromosomes but with an intersex condition, who had gotten the condition surgically altered; it has since changed the policy language to so indicate.)

Now beauty pageants, like theatrical productions, have a First Amendment right to choose who competes in them, including based on sex, gender identity, marital status (Miss), citizenship status (America), age, race or ethnicity (as is the case with some such competitions, though not Miss America itself), and more. Green v. Miss United States of America (9th Cir. 2022) so recognized, in upholding a pageant's requirement that participants be "natural born females":

As with theater, cinema, or the Super Bowl halftime show, beauty pageants combine speech with live performances such as music and dancing to express a message. And while the content of that message varies from pageant to pageant, it is commonly understood that beauty pageants are generally designed to express the "ideal vision of American womanhood." In doing so, pageants "provide communities with the opportunity to articulate the norms of appropriate femininity both for themselves and for spectators alike."

Equally important to this case is understanding the method by which the Pageant expresses its view of womanhood. Given a pageant's competitive and performative structure, it is clear that who competes and succeeds in a pageant is how the pageant speaks. Put differently, the Pageant's message cannot be divorced from the Pageant's selection and evaluation of contestants. This interdependent dynamic between medium and message is well-established and well-protected in our caselaw….

I think that's right, for the reasons given in an amicus brief I filed in that case.

Likewise, a beauty pageant would have the right to include transgender people. By way of analogy, the producers of a play about the Framers would have a right to cast only whites (for historical verisimilitude), mostly blacks (as in Hamilton), or others.

The Florida AG's objection is that "'Miss' America and 'Miss' Florida advertise as women-only competitions, which is misleading and may violate FL law" (see the Tweet for the letter). But that strikes me as unsound, just as it would be unsound for a blue-state AG to go after Miss United States of America on the grounds that its exclusion of male-to-female transgender contestants is "misleading" given that AG's view that his state's residents would assume "Miss" does include such transgender contestants.

People obviously have sharp disputes about how to define "Miss," "Asian" (consider the eligibility rules for Miss Asian America), "America," "democracy," "genocide," "global warming," and a vast range of other terms. It's not for the government to resolve how people can use those terms in books, films, plays, pageants, and other fully First-Amendment-protected materials, and in promotion of those materials that characterizes the content of the materials. See, e.g., Groden v. Random House (2d Cir. 1995); Incarcerated Entm't v. CNBC (D. Del. 2018).

In commercial advertising for nonspeech products (cars, food, and the like), misleading statements can indeed be restricted (though even there I'm not sure that courts would decide which of various contested definitions of "miss" is the right one). Indeed, even commercial advertising for books and the like might be restricted as misleading if it relates to the nonspeech features of the product, such as its price or other terms on which it's being bought (e.g., if an ad misleadingly offers a video for sale while in reality it's a rental).

But the government generally has no business threatening legal liability for allegedly misleading books, or for advertisements that describe the content of the books in ideologically controversial ways that one side of the debate calls misleading. That's likewise true for newspapers, magazines, films, plays, and pageants. Public pressure aimed at getting a pageant to change its eligibility definitions, and how it describes those definitions, is generally fine. But threats of government "enforcement action," I think, are not.

The post Depends on What the Meaning of "Miss" Is: The Miss America Gender Identity Controversy appeared first on Reason.com.

"I Swear, if You Don't Drop Out of Miss Pennsylvania, I Will Come to Your Home and Set It on Fire"

2026-04-15T17:40:28Z

A short excerpt from Judge Julia Munley's long decision last month in Vespico v. Kass-Gerji (M.D. Pa.) (note that the quote from the title and the subtitle is from the court opinion, which in turn cites a transcript of an anti-stalking order hearing):

Each June, the Miss Pennsylvania competition is held in York at the Appell Center for the Performing Arts. The winner goes on to represent the Commonwealth in the Miss America pageant. Leading up to the 2024 competition, what may have started as a backstage rivalry escalated into something uglier.

According to Defendant Robyn Kass-Gerji, it was the plaintiff, Victoria Vespico, whose conduct went beyond the pale. Kass-Gerji claims she was subjected to months of harassing text messages and threats against her life. According to Kass-Gerji, Vespico also threatened to kill her mother, her boyfriend, and her dog.

Vespico tells a very different story. She insists that she never sent a single message and paints Kass-Gerji as the true aggressor. That is, Vespico describes Kass-Gerji as someone willing to fabricate evidence, file a fraudulent petition for a protection order, and lie under oath.

Days before the contestants took the stage at the Miss Pennsylvania pageant, a hearing was convened—not before a pageant director, but a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. The subject matter was credibility, not congeniality.

After listening to both sides over the course of a two-day hearing, the judge ruled in favor of Kass-Gerji and issued an anti-stalking order ("ASO") against Vespico. The judge concluded that Vespico was not believable and that she had sent the threatening texts. He determined that Kass-Gerji was not lying or fabricating evidence.

Vespico, however, stands firm. She points to Kass-Gerji's conduct after obtaining the ASO as signs that the defendant made it all up to get attention—withdrawing from Miss Pennsylvania, sitting for a TV interview with a local news affiliate during the pageant, and sharing details about the texts and legal proceedings with a British tabloid journalist.

The tabloid involved was the Daily Mail. After the curtain fell on the 2024 Miss Pennsylvania pageant, the Mail published an article: "Miss Pennsylvania runner-up Victoria Vespico called rival Robyn Kass-Gerji 'piggy b***h and texted her: 'Are u ready to die now?' – before landing a job mentoring America's kids." The Mail used full names, referenced body shaming and death threats, and hinted at children being at risk, and that was only the headline.

After seeing her image run through the filter of a British tabloid, Vespico filed this abuse of process, defamation, and false light lawsuit against Kass-Gerji, Daily Mail, and Laura Collins, the reporter who authored the article. Following the voluntary dismissal of the Mail and Collins, the action now proceeds only against Kass-Gerji.

Before the court is the defendant's motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The motion will be granted. The D.C. Superior Court's findings, detailed below, bear directly on that determination. Because Kass-Gerji also seeks attorneys' fees, the court also addresses Pennsylvania's Anti-SLAPP statute….

Upon review of the allegations in the complaint and the transcript from the ASO proceedings, the D.C. Superior Court determined that Vespico violated the stalking statute by engaging in the very harassment and threats that Kass-Gerji later described to the media, which are the alleged false statements in the complaint under review…. Consequently, the truth of whether Vespico sent threatening or intimidating texts to Kass-Gerji has already been litigated and those findings were critical to the entry of the ASO by the D.C. Superior Court…. Therefore, because all four elements of D.C.'s collateral estoppel doctrine are met, the D.C. Superior Court's determination that Vespico engaged in the harassment and threats that Kass-Gerji described to the media is conclusive and may not be relitigated.

As for the claim for defamation per se, truth is an absolute defense under Pennsylvania law regardless of the per se characterization. The findings of the D.C. Superior Court establish the truth of Kass-Gerji's statements, and thus Vespico cannot meet her burden of proving falsity….

Edward Jonathan Canter and Sloan Elizabeth Nickel (Litson PLLC) and Richard L. Armezzani (Myers, Brier & Kelly, LLP) represent Kass-Gerji.

The post "I Swear, if You Don't Drop Out of Miss Pennsylvania, I Will Come to Your Home and Set It on Fire" appeared first on Reason.com.

Expedited Discovery Allowed in Sheriff's Defamation Case, Which Alleges Claims of Unwarranted ICE-Related Detention were a Hoax

2026-04-15T17:40:59Z

From Monday's order by Judge Brett Ludwig in Schmidt v. Naqvi (E.D. Wis.):

Plaintiff Dale Schmidt is … the elected sheriff of Dodge County, Wisconsin…. Defendant Kevin Morrison is … a prior candidate for the United States House of Representatives [and currently a Cook County, Ill. Commissioner -EV]. Schmidt is suing [Sundas] Naqvi, Morrison, and unidentified Doe Defendants for falsely claiming that Naqvi was illegally detained at Dodge County Jail from March 5, 2026 through March 7, 2026.

Schmidt maintains that Naqvi was never booked or detained at Dodge County Jail. He alleges that, in actuality, Naqvi arrived at O'Hare International Airport on March 5, 2026, checked into a Hampton Inn & Suites located in Rosemont, Illinois, and, in the early morning hours of March 7, 2026, was dropped off at a Holiday Inn Hotel in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

Schmidt seeks leave from the Court to conduct limited, expedited discovery to subpoena T-Mobile, Naqvi's cellphone provider, to produce text messages, call details, and records. He also seeks to subpoena the relevant hotels for exterior and lobby video surveillance, limited in date and times. For the reasons discussed below, Schmidt's motion will be granted….

"A party may not seek discovery from any source before the parties have conferred as required by Rule 26(f), except … when authorized … by court order." … Schmidt has shown sufficient good cause to support his request [for a subpoena without a Rule 26(f) conference]…. [A] prima facie claim of defamation in Wisconsin requires plausible allegations that the defendants made a false statement, communicated by speech; communicated to a third party; and the communication is unprivileged and tends to harm one's reputation. Schmidt alleges that Naqvi and Morrison falsely publicized that Naqvi was illegally detained at Dodge County Jail, which could harm Schmidt's reputation. Accordingly, he has made a prima facie claim of actionable harm.

Next, Schmidt seeks concrete, narrow information: Naqvi's cellphone records and the exterior and lobby surveillance footage from the pertinent Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn, limited to relevant dates and times. The Court also notes that while there are alternative means to obtain the subpoenaed information, these methods are outweighed by the risk of the records overwritten and/or purged in the ordinary course of business, thus satisfying the third and fourth elements.

The Court also finds that the subpoenaed information will advance Schmidt's claim. To begin with, video surveillance could prove his allegations about Naqvi's actual whereabout during the time she claimed to be detained at Dodge County Jail. Moreover, Naqvi's cellphone records may help Schmidt identify the unknown Doe Defendants. Doe Defendants must be identified and served within ninety days of the commencement of the action against them, and, accordingly, this information is necessary to proceed with the claims against Doe Defendants….

[And] the Court is satisfied that Schmidt's interest in protecting himself from defamation outweighs the defendants' privacy interest. The statements made "caused reputational harm and damages" to Schmidt, "particularly as he prepared for a re-election campaign." The defendants' interest is minimal; by publicizing statements about Schmidt and the alleged detention, they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information that could disprove their statements….

Here are more details on the allegation, from Friday's Complaint in Schmidt v. Naqvi (E.D. Wis.); recall that these are just allegations, made "Upon information and belief" of the plaintiff, and any factfinding will be some time in the future:

On or about March 5, 2026, Defendant Naqvi alleges she arrived at O'Hare International Airport … on a flight from Istanbul, Turkey. Security footage at O'Hare shows Defendant Naqvi entering a secondary inspection area at 10:46 a.m. and leaving the secondary inspection area to a public area at 11:42 a.m.

[O]n or about March 5, 2026, Naqvi checked into the Hampton Inn & Suites located at 9480 W. Higgons Road, Rosemont, Illinois 60018. Upon information and belief, on or about March 8, 2026, at approximately 1:32 p.m. Naqvi checked out of the Hampton Inn & Suites…. [D]uring the late evening of March 6, 2026 and early morning hours of March 7, 2026, Defendant Naqvi arranged for transportation from an acquaintance from the Hampton Inn & Suites near O'Hare to Wisconsin…. On or around March 7, 2026, at approximately 5:38 a.m., Naqvi was seen at a gas station in the Slinger, Wisconsin area…. Naqvi was dropped off at a Holiday Inn Hotel in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin at approximately 6:33 a.m on March 7, 2026.

Despite the real facts described above, Naqvi publicly claimed that upon her arrival at O'Hare on March 5, 2026, she was taken into custody and detained at O'Hare[,] … publicly claimed that after being detained for 30 hours at O'Hare she was transported from O'Hare to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, Illinois[,] … [and] publicly claimed that she was transported across state lines to Wisconsin where she claimed to have been held at the Dodge County Jail. Naqvi claims Dodge County Sheriff's Office subsequently released her from the facility on March 7, 2026.

On or about, March 8, 2026, Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison, then a candidate for the United States Congress, stated during a press conference that Naqvi and five other individuals were transported from Illinois to Wisconsin by immigration agents. During this press conference Commissioner Morrison made allegations of an illegal detention of a U.S. citizen by government officials, including Sheriff Schmidt.

Commissioner Morrison made allegations of a "cover up" by the Dodge County Sheriff's Office. For example, on March 9, 2026, upon information and belief at the direction of Naqvi, Commissioner Morrison made the following statements to WISN 12 News directed at Sheriff Schmidt: "[t]hey have been lying from the very start of this. I don't think they want to own up to the fact that, once again, they have illegally detained American citizen without due process."

On March 9, 2026, Commissioner Morrison further publicly reported that after Naqvi was allegedly released from the Dodge County Jail, Naqvi "walked to a nearby gas station and hitchhiked to a Holiday Inn, several miles away from the detention facility for refuge before her sister was able to get to her."

Many of the statements made by Commissioner Morrison were also disseminated through Commissioner Morrison's social media channels, which were widely shared:

… News reports detailing the allegations were published and disseminated throughout Wisconsin and Illinois media outlets, as well as nationally distributed news media…. In addition to the widespread news coverage, Naqvi's and Commissioner Morrison's allegations have similarly been published and disseminated through various social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and X….

Naqvi was never booked or detained at the Dodge County Jail. Dodge County Jail logs show no female inmates or detainees from the federal government were admitted or released during the timeframe in which these events were alleged to have occurred. The statements made by Defendants were demonstrably false statements of fact, not opinions, and are capable of being proven false….

The post Expedited Discovery Allowed in Sheriff's Defamation Case, Which Alleges Claims of Unwarranted ICE-Related Detention were a Hoax appeared first on Reason.com.

Mamdani's Fix for Food Deserts: Opening a $30 Million City-Owned Grocery Store Near Other Grocery Stores

2026-04-15T18:10:30Z

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has now been in office for a little over 100 days, and while he has not yet delivered on his campaign promises to freeze the rent or make buses free, his city-owned grocery stores are one step closer to opening.

Earlier this week, Mamdani announced that a vacant lot next to La Marqueta, an East Harlem marketplace already owned by the city, will be the site of a city-owned grocery store. Mamdani said he announced this location first because it will be built from the ground up, unlike the other stores. The mayor expects the city to spend $30 million on construction costs, according to The New York Times. That's almost half of the $70 million total the administration has announced it plans to spend on all five stores.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani discusses plans for a city-owned grocery store in East Harlem. (Meagan O'Rourke)

This week, the Mamdani administration gave more details on how the stores would work. To lower prices, the city will choose a private operator to run each store, who would "be contractually required to pass savings directly to customers on a core basket of everyday staples."

"At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation," Mamdani told a crowd at a rally on Sunday commemorating his first 100 days in office.

It's unclear how discounted the groceries will be at the city-owned stores. When asked about the savings on Tuesday, Mamdani said New Yorkers will see a "clear price differential" comparing the stores' core basket of essential goods to other food costs.

"The difference in this approach is that we are not hoping for affordability. We're guaranteeing affordability," he added.

But there is little reason to believe that city-run grocery stores are the solution to the "unsolvable equation" of affordability.

First, the problem is somewhat misdiagnosed. Mamdani's deputy mayor for economic justice told Bloomberg the administration is prioritizing opening grocery stores in food deserts—a term for areas that lack access to produce and healthy foods. And during Tuesday's press conference at La Marqueta, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal claimed a city-owned grocery store was necessary in East Harlem because "fresh produce is harder to find" in the neighborhood, forcing residents to rely on cheaper, processed foods.

Setting aside the fact that proximity to produce-filled grocery stores does not necessarily correlate with healthier outcomes for shoppers, New York City is hardly a food desert. A recent study from a group of international researchers found that New York City was the top-ranked major American city for food access. A quick search on Google Maps also reveals that there are several grocery stores within blocks of La Marqueta in East Harlem, including one that's a 3-minute walk away, which sells fresh produce.

Produce section at City Fresh Market in East Harlem. (Meagan O'Rourke)

Photo of a grocery store in East Harlem, a 3-minute walk away from La Marqueta. (Meagan O'Rourke)

Debates over food deserts aside, Mamdani has already anticipated some pushback from his critics who say government-run grocery stores won't work.

"My answer to them is simple," he said. "I look forward to the competition. May the most affordable grocery store win."

But, by definition, the government-owned grocery store would not actually foster competition because it would be largely insulated from price signals and subsidized by taxpayers.

"Private grocers keep costs down by utilizing complex supply chains and economies of scale that Mamdani's stores won't have access to," writes Reason's Natalie Dowzicky. The city store likely would not have access to this supply chain, so the government (and therefore taxpayers) will have to step in. Instead of encouraging more competition in the city and welcoming stores like Walmart, which are able to offer food at low prices without intervention, Mamdani's plan artificially keeps prices low and passes the costs off to the government, which currently faces a $5.4 billion budget gap.

Although the plan is appealing to some residents, it is drawing criticism from the grocery store industry.

"To have the city decide to open a store in the same neighborhood in which our members are operating at already low margins — because running a store in the city is very expensive, extremely expensive — we feel that it's a big slap in the face to us," Antonio Pena, the president of the National Supermarket Association, told Gothamist.

The local stores will not have to worry about the competition too soon, however. Like most government projects, the store in East Harlem will take years to open. The first city-owned grocery store is expected to open in 2027, and the store at the La Marqueta site will open by 2029.

The post Mamdani's Fix for Food Deserts: Opening a $30 Million City-Owned Grocery Store Near Other Grocery Stores appeared first on Reason.com.

Court Ordered Critic of Ex-Mayoral Candidate to Stop "Publicly Writing, Printing, or Speaking [Ex-Candidate's] Name"

2026-04-15T16:33:56Z

From today's Coble v. Ballentine, by N.C. Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, joined by Judges John Arrowood and April Wood:

Although Defendant and Plaintiff were originally friendly with each other, their relationship deteriorated upon the death of Defendant's father. Defendant has not directly contacted Plaintiff since 2022.

Defendant and Plaintiff are active in local politics and use their social media accounts to express their political views. While both associate with the Randolph County Republican Party, Defendant and Plaintiff have supported opposing candidates in the past.

In March 2024, Plaintiff announced on Facebook that she would run for mayor of Randleman in the 2025 election. Later that year, in response to Plaintiff's candidacy announcement, Defendant made a Facebook page titled "Anybody But Coble." Additionally, Defendant later created a website, www.AnybodyButCoble.org. On these platforms, Defendant wrote articles opposing Plaintiff's mayoral candidacy. Facially, Defendant created "Anybody But Coble" to assist voters in their mayoral candidate selection for Randleman….

[Around the start of 2025], Plaintiff stated online that she would no longer run for mayor. Nevertheless, the mayoral candidate filing period remained open until July 2025. Despite Plaintiff's online statement that she would not run for mayor, Defendant did not remove the content on his platforms concerning his opposition to Plaintiff's mayoral candidacy.

Plaintiff sought a "no-contact order against Defendant," and the trial court "ordered Defendant to refrain from publicly writing, printing, or speaking Plaintiff's name in any manner as well as going within fifty yards of Plaintiff." The appellate court reversed:

A person may commence an action for a civil no-contact order when he or she is a victim of unlawful conduct [including stalking, defined as] … the following or harassing of another person on more than one occasion without legal purpose with the intent to either (1) instill reasonable fear in another person for their safety or the safety of those close to them, or (2) cause another "to suffer substantial emotional distress by placing that person in fear of death, bodily injury, or continued harassment and that in fact causes that person substantial emotional distress." Furthermore, such harassment includes knowing conduct such as "written or printed communication or transmission … or other computerized or electronic transmissions directed at a specific person that torments, terrorizes, or terrifies that person and that serves no legitimate purpose." Simply, civil harassment constitutes "(1) knowing conduct (2) directed at (3) a specific person (4) that torments, terrorizes, or terrifies, and (5) serves no legitimate purpose."

This Court has acknowledged a distinction between online posts written "about" an individual and those sent "directly to" an individual. Weller v. Jackson (N.C. App. 2021) (unpublished) (citing State v. Shackleford (2019)). In Weller, the defendant posted online articles that discussed the plaintiff, but these posts were not directed at the plaintiff; therefore, the no-contact order was reversed. Unlike the criminal stalking statute in Shackleford, Chapter 50C concerning civil no-contact orders does not expressly include definitional language of communicating "to or about a person."

Here, Defendant posted online articles and opinions about Plaintiff and her eligibility as mayor; they were not directed to her. Even assuming Defendant was aware Plaintiff used social media, such awareness does not necessarily mean Defendant directed his online posts to Plaintiff. Furthermore, the purported purpose of "Anybody But Coble" to aid voters buttresses the notion that Defendant's publications were directed at undecided voters in Randleman, not Plaintiff.

Moreover, writing in the second person suggests the writer is writing directly to someone; we do not see the use of the second person in Defendant's posts. Defendant refers to Plaintiff in the third person throughout his publications in "Anybody But Coble." While writing in the third person is not dispositive, it tends to support Defendant's claim that his online communications were about Plaintiff…. Therefore, there is a lack of evidence to support a finding that Defendant stalked or harassed Plaintiff. Thus, we reverse the trial court's no-contact order. Accordingly, this Court need not address Defendant's First Amendment argument….

David W. Rubin and James C. Grant (FIRE) and Greg Gaught (Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard, L.L.P.) represent defendant.

The post Court Ordered Critic of Ex-Mayoral Candidate to Stop "Publicly Writing, Printing, or Speaking [Ex-Candidate's] Name" appeared first on Reason.com.

Child Care Costs Over $13,000 a Year. Regulation Is a Big Reason Why.

2026-04-15T16:17:40Z

Child care got expensive—more than $13,000 per child, per year.

So many people want government to pay for it.

My state just agreed. New York will fund free child care. Yay!

But wait—what government does isn't free. Taxpayers pay. And taxpayers pay more because "government rules have unintended consequences," says Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women's Forum.

Washington, D.C., day care teachers must have a degree in early childhood education. That can take two years and cost $22,000.

"Of course you're going to have to pay a lot more," says Lukas in my new video, "when you've asked people to invest tens of thousands of dollars in degrees."

Many government rules are just dumb.

Illinois says providers must offer coins for pay phones.

Providers must have "one crib with mattress, sheet, and blanket per infant," but wait! Illinois also says, "Soft bedding…shall not be used."

Which is it?!

Illinois bureaucrats told us their rules are "being updated."

Red states have dumb rules, too.

Oklahoma's regulations specify exact number of items providers must have: two nesting, stacking and interlocking toys per one to two kids, two toddler pounding toys, two support pillows, three squeaky toys, two knobbed puzzles, three wrist or ankle bells.

Really. Oklahoma's regulations go on for 180 pages!

"Policymakers talk about the lack of affordable care," says Lukas, "yet here they are layering on regulations that make it impossible for people to come and fill that need. This pushes good people out of the industry."

It also stops good people from providing in-home care.

"In-home day care is often what parents want most," says Lucas. "Places that most replicate that comfortable, family-supportive environment."

In-home care used to be the most common form of child care, but not anymore.

"Regulations make it really hard for someone who has their own kids, who's already going to be staying at home, to invite other kids to that home," says Lucas.

Michigan requires a license to take care of even one other child. Getting that license can take six months, and requires CPR training, infectious disease training, child abuse training, a six-hour orientation, an environmental health inspection.

"Those rules don't help kids as much as raise costs," says Lucas. "Fewer people enter the market, and parents are left with fewer options."

Lukas is raising five kids, but she says the rules would discourage her from ever trying to offer home care.

"There are things that no family would ever comply with. I would have to go into my cabinets and find every cereal box and make sure it was in a sealed container."

Delaware's regulations say: "Food must be stored in closed or sealed containers."

Also, endless government rules don't guarantee safety. Missouri's Adventure Learning Center had a license. Teachers there were caught telling 3-year-olds to fight.

Real crooks ignore government rules altogether, as Minnesota's day care scandal showed. Incompetent government rarely checks.

"Here they were," says Lukas, driving the law-abiding centers out of the day care market, but in the meantime, "funneling millions of taxpayer dollars…letting money flow to those who weren't providing any care at all."

"There should be no regulations?" I ask.

"A background check for a day care provider is a reasonable requirement, but other than that, I think we really should be trusting parents, not government, to make the decision on what makes sense for their child….Parents, not government, care the most about kids."

Activists and politicians always think more rules make things better.

More often than not, they make things worse.

The post Child Care Costs Over $13,000 a Year. Regulation Is a Big Reason Why. appeared first on Reason.com.

Anti-Hate Poster Has No Home in Ohio Classroom, Says School District

2026-04-15T16:09:31Z

"Hate Has No Home Here," read the classroom poster. The school board said it had to go. Now, the teacher who put up the poster is suing, saying his First Amendment rights were violated.

How could such an anodyne message spark a constitutional controversy? The drama stems from the images under the words: five hands—of varying skin colors—holding five hearts, each decorated differently. The largest heart features an American flag pattern. One heart has a peace sign on it. The controversial hearts feature stripes, one in a rainbow of colors and one in pink, blue, and white.

The Little Miami school board says these images violate the district's policy regarding instructional materials "relating to sexual orientation or gender identity."

The striped hearts are, of course, done up in the colors of LGBTQ and transgender pride symbols—though that's something one would only know if they're already aware of these symbols. The images themselves are simply striped hearts, and the poster makes no mention of anything related to sexual orientation or gender identity.

What's more, the teacher in this case—going in court documents by John Doe—said he never offered classroom instruction based on the poster. So, the idea that it represented classroom instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity seems somewhat lacking.

Is an Anti-Bullying Message 'Sexuality Content' Under Ohio Law?

Taken at face value, this poster does not say anything about the morality of same-sex attraction. It does not encourage gender nonconformity or weigh in on what really makes someone a girl or a boy. It simply suggests that we should not hate people based on sexual orientation, gender identity, skin color, or other characteristics.

The purpose of the poster was to suggest that "bullying and/or targeting will not be tolerated," Doe told school board members in an email obtained by The Cincinnati Enquirer. "I have never incorporated the flag into the curriculum itself or used it as an instructional item when covering any sensitive topics in class."

The "Hate Has No Home Here" poster is one of many posters and flags hung in Doe's classroom, per his suit. There's also an American flag, a Cincinnati Bengals flag, a "COEXIST" poster featuring different religious symbols, photographs of presidents and civil rights leaders, a Rosie the Riveter poster, vintage Uncle Sam "I Want You" recruitment posters, a Christmas Story poster, and a Batman poster.

According to Doe's lawsuit, Little Miami School Board President David Wallace saw the poster hanging in his high school social studies classroom and filed a complaint. In February, the board voted 4–1 to require the poster's removal, saying it fell into the category of "instruction that includes sexuality content" and would trigger the district's "Parents' Bill of Rights."

Little Miami's parental rights policy was adopted in direct response to an Ohio law that took effect last summer. That law requires all public school districts to "provide parents the opportunity to review any instructional material that includes sexuality content" and, at a parent's request, excuse students "from instruction that includes sexuality content and [permit them] to participate in an alternative assignment."

The new law defines sexuality content as "any oral or written instruction, presentation, image, or description of sexual concepts or gender ideology provided in a classroom setting." But it explicitly exempts "incidental references to sexual concepts or gender ideology occurring outside of formal instruction or presentations on such topics, including references made during class participation and in schoolwork."

from Joe's complaint

A Broader Trend

As part of his suit, Doe wants to be able to hang the poster back up. Whether Doe will prevail on his free speech claims or not, the case highlights how out of control school policies against LGBTQ content can get.

In this case, it's unclear if Doe's poster would even count as "sexuality content" under Ohio law and trigger a parental notification requirement. And, even if it did, it's not clear that any parents of students in Doe's classes would object to the poster passively hanging there. Nonetheless, the Little Miami School Board simply voted to require its removal preemptively.

Parents and politicians who push for policies like these often say that they're simply against inappropriately sexual themes entering elementary school classrooms. But time and again, we're seeing school administrators target general and innocuous messages about inclusivity—or books that include gay or transgender characters.

LGBT Characters in Books Spur Teacher Suspension

In another Ohio school controversy, teacher Karen Cahall sued over her school district's response to her having four books with LGBTQ characters in her third-grade classroom.

The books—Ana On The Edge by A.J. Sass, The Fabulous Zed Watson by Basil Sylvester, Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea by Ashley Herring Blake, and Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff—did not include any sexual content, Cahall pointed out in a 2024 federal lawsuit. Moreover, they "were intermingled among approximately one hundred other books, were not prominently displayed by plaintiff Karen Cahall in her classroom, plaintiff Karen Cahall did not teach from those books as part of her instructional program, and did not require students to read those books."

"These books each deal with characters who are LGBTQ+ and are coming to terms with feeling different and excluded simply because they are LGBTQ+ and serve to reinforce plaintiff Karen Cahall's sincerely held moral and religious beliefs that all children, including children who are LGBTQ+ or the children of parents who are LGBTQ+, deserve to be respected, accepted, and loved for who they are," states Cahall's lawsuit.

For having these books in her classroom, Cahall was suspended for three days without pay. She was also ordered to remove not just those four books but her whole classroom library of about 100 books.

Cahall's suit was dismissed, with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio finding that New Richmond's "controversial issues" policy, under the auspices of which it acted to require the books' removal, was not unconstitutionally vague.

Now, Cahall—who is still employed as a third-grade teacher at New Richmond's Monroe Elementary—has "teamed up with experts across the state, including a former student, to launch the Rainbow Classroom Fund, aimed at giving Ohio teachers more legal and educational support than she had," the Enquirer reports.

She is also appealing the lower court's ruling dismissing her case.

"The absence of any articulable standard for determining whether simply maintaining a book featuring an LGBTQ+ character implicated the 'controversial issues' policy and the lack of any articulable standard for determining whether simply maintaining a book make it part of an 'instructional program' when it is not used in classroom instruction exacerbated the violation of Ms. Cahall's due process rights," her appeal states.

In The News

Facial recognition glasses are 'dangerous and dystopian.' The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and 75 other groups are urging Meta to drop reported plans to include facial recognition technology in its artificially intelligent glasses.

"The American people have not consented to this massive invasion of privacy," Kade Crockford, director of technology and justice programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. "Stalkers and scammers would have a field day with this technology. Federal agents could use it to harass and intimidate their critics. It's dangerous and dystopian, and Meta must disavow it."

In February, The New York Times reported that Meta "plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year," and it "would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta's artificial intelligence assistant."

But the Times also suggests that the idea is tentative and notes that "Meta's plans could change."

The ACLU and other civil liberties groups are trying to spur that change. "Facial recognition technology built into inconspicuous consumer eyewear represents a serious
threat to privacy and civil liberties for every member of our society, and particularly for
historically marginalized and vulnerable groups," says their April 13 letter. More:

People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors.

Meta's reported plans to introduce this technology into broadly available consumer products is a red line society must not cross. Preventing this outcome is not just a privacy preference. It is a prerequisite for a free and safe society.

Meta should not proceed with this product release.

Read This Thread

The new social media ban in Massachusetts is so sweeping in its definition of "social media" that it would require age-verification for Wikipedia. You don't protect kids by cutting off resources.acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:…

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T23:19:59.555Z

More Sex & Tech News

• Recent court rulings are making Section 230 functionally irrelevant, warns Mike Masnick of Techdirt.

• Emily Oster pushes back on the theory that smartphones are behind global test score declines.

Did smart phones cause global test score declines? No, probably not. (It was school closures).

A cautionary note about accepting results because they confirm our priors…https://t.co/ktYd7whWdN

— Emily Oster (@ProfEmilyOster) April 13, 2026

• "Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta changed its speech rules to add new restrictions around posts including the word 'antifa,'" reports The Intercept.

• Off Christopher Street, a new podcast from David Sessions and Blake Smith, uses the archives of the mid–20th century magazine known as the "gay New Yorker" as a jumping-off point to talk about today's gay culture.

• The government is using a grand jury to try and unmask an anonymous Reddit user, and the "whole thing looks like a fishing expedition by the DOJ on behalf of ICE," notes Tim Cushing.

• A new bill in France seeks to decriminalize sex work for both buyers and sellers.

• Freya India argues that social media has had a feminizing effect on everyone who interacts with it—or, more specifically, that it's made grown women and men alike act like teen girls. Katherine Dee's pushback is worth a read.

• Anthropic and OpenAI continue to demonstrate their differences in values:

New: Anthropic is opposing the OpenAI-backed Illinois bill that would shield AI labs from liability for mass deaths or financial disasters caused by AI models.

Governor Pritzker is signaling he doesn't like the bill, but it's exposing new battlelines in the AI policy debate. pic.twitter.com/fQnYbmdCQ8

— Max Zeff (@ZeffMax) April 14, 2026

• A plea to keep Siri dumb

The post Anti-Hate Poster Has No Home in Ohio Classroom, Says School District appeared first on Reason.com.

On the Duty To Disobey Unjust Commands

2026-04-15T15:20:59Z

Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, by Omri Boehm, New York Review Books, 192 pages, $17.95

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," the Declaration of Independence famously announces: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

"What grounds the truths in the declaration's legendary second sentence, let alone their self-evidence?" asks Omri Boehm, a philosopher at the New School for Social Research. He sets out to answer that question in Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, a philosophically dense but intellectually rewarding book.

Boehm's inquiry into the moral foundations of universal human dignity is all the more urgent as both right and left embrace the politics of identity. The neo-reactionary right speaks of blood, soil, and heritage; the politically correct left of sex, gender, and race. They are ideological antagonists, but each seeks to slice humanity into warring minitribes. Boehm also takes to task progressive liberals whose affirmation of universal human dignity rests unsteadily on a fickle democratic consensus.

To make his case for universal human dignity, Boehm delves into the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. He concludes that there is a fundamental moral freedom—and duty—to disobey unjust commands.

Libertarians certainly embrace the preeminent importance of human dignity. "In the liberal tradition, the principle of human dignity is the bedrock upon which all other tenets rest," the Institute for Humane Studies proclaims. "This radical equality is what separates classical liberalism from other schools of thought and serves as the moral justification for its broader principles."

The late Cato Institute scholar David Boaz agreed: "Libertarian thought emphasizes the dignity of each individual, which entails both rights and responsibility." Libertarians will also appreciate Kant's conclusion in his The Metaphysics of Ethics: "The law or universal rule of right is, So act that the use of thy freedom may not circumscribe the freedom of any other."

Human dignity, Kant argues, rests on the fact that we are the only rational creatures on Earth; as such, we can be guided by and can subject ourselves to moral claims. People are "free because reasons and justifications can determine their behavior, not just causes," explains Boehm. "Moral precept can motivate them, not just interest."

Because people are free moral agents, it is therefore illegitimate for anyone to treat other human beings as mere objects that can be used and commanded. Kant famously encapsulated this insight in the second version of his categorical imperative: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only." In other words, we should recognize and honor the intrinsic value, autonomy, and rational agency of our fellow human beings.

Boehm cites Kant's critical distinction between a price and a dignity. Objects can be priced, whereas moral capability endows human beings with an inner worth that is beyond pricing. Put differently: Commodities or tools possess value only in relation to human needs or desires, while things with dignity possess worth in themselves, regardless of utility.

"Radical universalism," Boehm argues, rests on the truth that human dignity deriving from the fact of an individual's free moral agency stands above any concrete anthropological, historical, sociological, psychological, or biological facts. In other words, human dignity transcends any claims based on mere identity.

Boehm then offers a Kantian reading of the Declaration of Independence and its self-evident truths that "all men are created equal" and are endowed with "certain unalienable rights." Unalienable rights mean rights that cannot be taken away, denied, or transferred to another person. Logically speaking, this precludes slavery—and Boehm traces how the force of the declaration's moral claims led eventually to the recognition of slavery's evils and to its violent abolition in the United States.

While Kant retained some of the racist beliefs of his 18th century contemporaries, he also argued that "there can be nothing more horrendous than that the action of a human being shall stand under the will of another. Hence no antipathy can be more natural than that which a human being has towards slavery."

In his esoteric interpretation of the biblical story of the binding of Isaac, Boehm makes an even more radical claim about moral universalism. In the traditional reading, which Kant accepted and criticized, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son is the ultimate example of obedience to God. Boehm offers an alternative interpretation, arguing that language choices in the verses suggest that the part of the story where an angel intervenes to forestall Isaac's sacrifice was interpolated into the text later. In the original version, he concludes, Abraham rejects God's command to kill his son as unjust and disobeys, releasing Isaac and sacrificing a ram.

In other words, Abraham chooses justice over an unjust command. As free moral agents, we have a duty to disobey when we are commanded to violate human dignity, even if those commands come from God. "The capacity to think freely—to think for oneself—replaces God or nature as the ground for radical universalism," writes Boehm.

Boehm believes that modern progressive liberals have made a profound error in replacing Kant's duty to moral truth with appeals to "consensus, interest and opinion." Boehm is particularly critical of the views of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Another philosopher, Lowell Nissen, summarized Dewey's theory of truth as the notion "that an idea is true if it works and that truth is determined by its consequences." Current versions of progressivism may "work" to seem inclusive by purporting to extend particular rights to racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. But making moral "truth" contingent on what works ultimately subjects minorities and outsiders to authority wielded in the name of the "majority's common sense, shared experience, interests, or consensus-based legitimate laws."

From time immemorial, convention and alleged common sense "worked" to justify slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, religious persecution, genocide, and innumerable wars of conquest and plunder. To the extent that moral consideration existed, it was frequently meant only for members of the in-group.

If we don't recognize the principle of universal human dignity, Boehm warns, identitarian politics will lead us back to a world of perpetually warring tribes.

The post On the Duty To Disobey Unjust Commands appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's Illegal War in Iran Is Financed by Your Taxes. That's a Good Reason To Stop Paying Them.

2026-04-15T15:09:05Z

This Tax Day, America needs a tax revolt.

The executive branch is out of control. We're now more than six weeks into a deeply unpopular, unnecessary war with Iran that lacks any semblance of congressional authorization. The Trump administration has sent masked, unaccountable goons into American cities, where they have harassed and arrested innocent people and killed multiple times. President Donald Trump's signature economic policy is an illegal tax increase that his administration is refusing to refund.

Congress has been unwilling or unable to stop these unlawful actions. If legislators will not deploy "the power of the purse," then it falls to the rest of us to do something.

That's why I have stopped paying the federal income tax. I'm not the only one doing it. I think you should, too.

What can this accomplish? I'm not naive enough to believe that my paltry contribution to the federal coffers matters much—I just finished filing my 2025 taxes and paid a sum in the low-five-figures. This is, first and foremost, a moral calculation rather than a fiscal one.

It's roughly the same conclusion that Henry David Thoreau reached when he looked at a federal government waging an unnecessary, unpopular war abroad and violently suppressing fundamental rights at home. "What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn," he concluded.

There is probably never a bad time to revisit Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (or to read it for the first time). The essay, first published in 1849, was a response to the then-ongoing Mexican-American War and the state-level debates over policies similar to what would eventually become the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law passed in 1850 requiring that escaped slaves be returned to their owners, even if captured in states that banned slavery. As a rumination on the relationship between citizens and the state, perhaps only the Declaration of Independence is a more important text. There is a good reason why "Civil Disobedience" influenced everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Leo Tolstoy to Martin Luther King, Jr.

On this Tax Day, many of us should grapple with the same question that Thoreau did. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday shows that just 24 percent of Americans believe the Iran War has been "worth it." The majority of Americans oppose the war, yet we are continuing to fund it at the rate of billions of dollars every day.

What can be done? That's ultimately a question everyone has to answer for themselves. I believe that Thoreau's conclusion is a good one: Do not lend support to the wrongdoing.

Were you waving a flag or banner at a "No Kings" protest in the past six months? That's fine and good. But then why continue sending a portion of your hard-earned money to the Trump administration? Yes, the federal government borrows much of what it spends these days. A cratering of tax receipts in the coming months wouldn't immediately grind the gears of government to a halt, but it would certainly cause a reaction in Washington.

"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood," Thoreau wrote.

Are there any better ways to signal your disagreement? Many critics of the administration are eager for the midterms in November—but is one single vote really more valuable than thousands of dollars in taxes that you'll pay between now and then?

Indeed, if the millions of Americans who plan to vote in November were to cancel their income tax withholding this week, it would certainly have a more immediate impact, and arguably a larger one. (That's even more true in an era when so few congressional districts are actually competitive, rendering so many votes utterly meaningless.) By all means, vote your conscience—or abstain from voting, if that's what your conscience says to do—but please don't accept the premise that voting is the only way to send a signal in a democratic system.

So, don't wait for November. Voice your disagreement now. Stop paying your federal income tax.

Practically, here's what I'm suggesting. Simply eliminate the automatic withholding of income tax from your pay.

This is much easier than you might believe it to be.

"If I wanted to turn off my income tax withholding, how difficult would that be?" is the question I put to our CFO last week. "Not especially hard," was the reply. He was right. All it took was a follow-up email, and the deed was done. I am utterly lost when it comes to managing any aspect of human resources—so if I can do this, so can you.

What about the consequences of this decision? In the very short term, there are none.

In the absence of income tax withholding, federal law requires quarterly "estimated tax" payments. Failing to make those can result in a penalty when this year's taxes are due next April.

If the Trump administration changes course between now and next year, or if the midterms are successful at creating a congressional majority more interested in checking the excesses of the executive branch, then you'll have the option to pay what's owed and carry on. In the meantime, however, you'll have stopped lending material support to the federal government's illegal actions.

And don't let the potential consequences dissuade you. Yes, Thoreau famously went to jail (for one night) as punishment for refusing to pay his taxes. In modern times, however, very few tax protesters have been hauled into federal court, and fewer still have been jailed.

"In fact, only two war tax resisters—James Otsuka (1949) and J. Tony Serra (2005)—were ever jailed for not paying taxes," according to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. (The group also provides some helpful guidance on determining what part of your federal taxes is used for wars, if you want to make a partial payment.)

In fact, some careful planning and savvy investing of your larger, tax-free paycheck might leave you better off—the federal government doesn't pay interest if you have too much tax withheld, after all. I'll be setting aside the amount of money that I would have paid in taxes each month, investing it in a stable mutual fund, and hoping the illegal war and/or illegal tariffs don't dent those earnings too much. (I'll report back on how this works out, but please don't take any of this as actual financial advice.)

When next April rolls around, you'll have a decision to make—and that's when I'll weigh the consequences too.

Here's what I plan to do, because if you've read this far, you're probably wondering about these things.

Yes, I'm still paying the federal payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security—yes, despite disliking how both those programs run. Those are separate pots of money, not directly funding the war or the bloody immigration crackdown.

Yes, I'm also continuing to have income tax withheld by the state of Virginia, where I live. State governments can also violate rights—and I'm wary about many of the ideas kicking around Richmond right now. Even so, Gov. Abigail Spanberger is not waging an illegal war, has not illegally taxed commerce, and has not sent masked goons into the streets to intimidate, harass, and murder Americans and immigrants. Seems like an important distinction. We can and should fight usual policy disagreements in the usual political channels.

Again, some guidance from Thoreau. Not every injustice can be met with maximum resistance, he notes in "Civil Disobedience." In fact, it is often true that we should abide by or quietly ignore laws that don't make sense or aren't entirely legal.

But when certain lines have been crossed, there is a moral obligation to respond. America needs a tax revolt to show the government who is really in charge.

The post Trump's Illegal War in Iran Is Financed by Your Taxes. That's a Good Reason To Stop Paying Them. appeared first on Reason.com.

How the Iran War Could Backfire

2026-04-14T20:20:12Z

Today's guest is Stimson Center Senior Fellow Emma Ashford, a foreign policy analyst who has written widely on post–Cold War strategy, the Middle East, and the limits of American power. An adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, a columnist at Foreign Policy, and a former Cato Institute staffer, Ashford is the author of First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World.

She talks with Nick Gillespie about the incoherence of President Donald Trump's Iran strategy and the surprising and disturbingly ineffective continuity of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

Previous appearance:

"Did Bombing Iran Make America Safer?" June 24, 2025

0:00—What is the U.S. objective for war in Iran?

5:32—Is Vice President J.D. Vance an anti-interventionist?

7:21—Trump's foreign policy rhetoric and history

13:26—Is there a continuity in post–Cold War foreign policy?

19:56—Was President Joe Biden an outlier on foreign policy?

22:16—U.S. involvement in Ukraine

24:13—Are we sending messages to China and Russia through Iran?

30:05—Does Trump have a de-escalation strategy in Iran?

Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post How the Iran War Could Backfire appeared first on Reason.com.

House Readies Spy Powers Vote

2026-04-15T13:27:23Z

House readies for a vote on warrantless spy powers. Last night, GOP leaders in the House cleared the way for a floor vote on an 18-month clean extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without additional privacy protections some Republicans had wanted.

Section 702 of FISA allows the government to obtain the communications of foreign surveillance targets without needing to go to a judge to get a traditional warrant. This section of the law has long been controversial, as the government has wide discretion to decide which foreigners it wants to put under surveillance, and Americans' communications are collected as part of this surveillance.

The government "routinely searches through [Section 702] data to find Americans' phone calls, text messages, and emails," notes the Brennan Center for Justice in a recent explainer. "This practice is a bait and switch that drives a gaping hole through the protections of the Fourth Amendment and FISA."

Section 702 of FISA will expire this coming Monday if Congress does not renew it. President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.), support a "clean" Section 702 extension, with no changes to the program.

But some Republican members of Congress are demanding additional privacy protections, including a requirement that the government obtain a warrant before accessing Americans' data, before reauthorizing the program.

Even so, two Republican Section 702 critics, Reps. Ralph Norman (R–S.C.) and Chip Roy (R–Texas), allowed a clean extension to pass through the House Rules Committee, of which they are both members, last night, reports Politico.

As The Hill notes this morning, lots of Republicans have flip-flopped on FISA reform.

That includes President Trump, who urged lawmakers to "KILL FISA" in 2024. Now he wants an extension of the law without any changes.

On the other hand, Democrats who voted to extend Section 702 in 2024, and helped kill amendments that added a warrant requirement to the law, are now opposing reauthorization. They say the law is much too dangerous in the hands of Donald Trump.

With Republicans' razor-thin margins in the House, Democratic opposition and a few GOP defectors could kill a Section 702 extension.

A more principled commitment to civil liberties among lawmakers, regardless of who the president is, would relieve Americans of having to depend on that razor-thin majority collapsing in order to reclaim their Fourth Amendment rights.

Hochul hoses holiday house havers. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has floated the idea of an additional tax on second homes worth over $5 million to help plug New York City's budget gap, reports The New York Times.

New York City is currently facing a $5.4 billion budget gap, which its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wants to close with additional taxes on wealthy individuals and large corporations. Those taxes, however, require approval from the state. Some state lawmakers, and Hochul herself, oppose Mamdani's largest revenue-raising ideas, like a proposed income tax hike.

Mamdani, for his part, has threatened a massive property tax hike if the state doesn't authorize more local taxes or release more financial aid to the city.

Hochul's proposed second home tax can be seen as a compromise measure that gives the city some of the revenue it wants via a very narrow tax on a group of wealthy property owners who may well live in New York part time.

Politically, such a tax is likely a lot more viable than a massive, broadband property tax hike. Even so, the Times notes that similar proposals have been floated and defeated in recent years.

Same time next year. If you think taxes are theft, it doesn't matter if New York is hiking taxes on second homes or sixth homes. It's all unjustified.

From a more practical perspective, a narrow tax on high-value second homes is not going to solve New York City's budget problems. Taxes with such narrow bases often pull in a lot less revenue than policymakers imagine. Even under Hochul's estimated revenue haul, a second home tax would close only about 10 percent of New York City's budget gap.

The question then becomes what happens next year. New York City's spending continues to grow year over year. As federal pandemic aid ends and tax revenues from New York's already steeply progressive tax system fall, the city's budget gap has grown larger and larger each year. It's projected to continue to grow.

Mamdani also wants a rash of new spending programs. The upshot is the state can tax second homes this year, bring in the whole $500 million it's hoping for, and then have to find another group of wealthy people to soak next year, and the year after that.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: In a very rare occurrence indeed, the fountain at Dupont Circle, just a few blocks from the Reason office, actually has water in it.

In Other Miracles: "Fountain Back On!" https://t.co/xGM7UwT3b0

— PoPville (@PoPville) April 14, 2026

QUICK HITS

First the robots came for the wild boars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a wild boar.

A video of a humanoid Polish robot named Edward Warchocki chasing wild boars through the streets of Warsaw has gone viral on social media pic.twitter.com/KSPWMC8TDQ

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 14, 2026

Federal prosecutors make a surprise visit to the Federal Reserve building.
Additional accusations against Eric Swalwell.
Reuters reports that shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is mostly unaffected by the U.S. blockade thus far.

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